Our OCR pipeline processes receipts in under 3 seconds with 95%+ accuracy. Learn how we built it and how it saves users an average of 2 hours per month.
Manual expense entry is the number one reason people abandon finance apps. It's tedious, error-prone, and adds friction to what should be a simple process. That's why we invested heavily in making receipt scanning fast, accurate, and delightful.
Our pipeline works in three stages. First, your phone's camera captures the receipt image, which gets uploaded to our secure cloud storage. Then AWS Textract performs OCR (optical character recognition) to extract raw text from the image. Finally, our AI enhancement layer parses the extracted text to identify the merchant name, date, individual line items, subtotal, tax, tip, and total amount.
The AI enhancement layer is where the real magic happens. Raw OCR output is messy — it contains formatting artifacts, misread characters, and ambiguous layouts. Our LLM-powered parser understands receipt structure contextually. It knows that the largest number at the bottom is likely the total, that a percentage-based line near the total is probably tax, and that the text at the top is usually the merchant name.
Accuracy matters enormously for a finance app. A misread "$15.00" as "$1500" would throw off your entire budget. We achieve 95%+ accuracy through a multi-pass approach: if the AI's confidence score is below our threshold, it flags the transaction for quick manual review rather than saving incorrect data.
The result is transformative for our users. On average, receipt scanning saves 2 hours per month compared to manual entry. For business users tracking expenses for reimbursement, the time savings are even more dramatic. And because the data is captured from the receipt itself, it's more detailed and accurate than what you'd get from a bank transaction description.
Looking ahead, we're working on batch scanning for multiple receipts, automatic currency detection for international travelers, and the ability to scan and split group receipts directly from the camera view.