ReceGuardReceipt Scanning: On-Device OCR You Can Correct
Text recognition runs on your iPhone through Apple's Vision framework. The receipt image is never uploaded to a ReceGuard server to be read.
What gets extracted
A scan produces more than a photograph. ReceGuard reads the receipt and fills in the fields that make a record searchable and reportable later: the merchant, the purchase date, the total, the tax, the currency, and the full text of the slip.
That last one matters more than it sounds. The raw text is kept and indexed, so a search for a product name months later finds the receipt even though nobody ever typed that product into a field.
| Field | Where it comes from | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Merchant | Read from the receipt | Identifies the vendor and usually implies the category. |
| Date | Read from the receipt | Decides the tax year, and for mileage the applicable rate. |
| Total and tax | Read from the receipt | VAT and sales tax are frequently reported separately from the net. |
| Currency | Read, or your country default | Keeps a trip abroad from polluting your home-currency totals. |
| Full receipt text | Read from the receipt | Makes the record searchable by anything printed on it. |
| Category and purpose | You set them | The two things no scanner can produce. |
Why you confirm before saving
Optical character recognition is very good and occasionally confidently wrong. An app that saves whatever it read, without showing you, is storing guesses that look like facts — and you will not find out until you reconcile against a statement in April.
The failures are predictable enough to check in about eight seconds. The total is read from the subtotal line, or from cash tendered. A European date is read in American order. A decimal comma is read as a thousands separator. The merchant name is taken from an advertising slogan at the top of the slip.
ReceGuard shows you what it read, against the image, before anything is filed. Fix what is wrong, add the business purpose, and the record is done.
Getting a scan the recognition can read
Quality is decided before the shutter. Flatten the receipt, avoid glare across the total, put it on a surface with contrast so edge detection finds the right rectangle, and hold the phone parallel to the paper rather than at an angle.
Most importantly, capture the whole slip. A photo cropped to "the important bit" loses the merchant and the date, which are two of the four things documentary evidence is supposed to show.
Till receipts are printed on thermal paper that fades with heat, light and time. A receipt left on a dashboard can be unreadable in a fortnight, and there is no reliable way to recover the print once it is gone. This is the single most common way a deduction is lost.
Where the processing happens
Apple's Vision framework has done accurate text recognition entirely on-device since iOS 13, and a modern iPhone reads a receipt in well under a second. That means uploading receipt images to a server is a product decision, not a technical requirement.
ReceGuard does not make that decision. Recognition runs locally, no account is required to start, and the app works in aeroplane mode. Nothing is uploaded unless you switch on iCloud sync, which uses your own private iCloud database rather than a ReceGuard-operated store.
Start with one receipt.
No account, no upload, no setup. Scan something from your wallet and see what the record looks like.
Download ReceGuard free