Receipt Scan turns a paper receipt into an email in about fifteen seconds.

Point the camera at the receipt. The app squares it up, reads it, and fills in the merchant, the date and the amount. Check the figures, add a category if you want one, and send. The receipt arrives as an email with the image attached, from your own address, at whatever address you chose - your accountant, your bookkeeper, or a folder in your own inbox.

VAT READ OFF THE RECEIPT

Where a receipt states VAT, the net, VAT and gross figures are captured as three separate values, so the email carries the breakdown your bookkeeper actually needs. History then groups what you have sent by month and totals the VAT within each one.

Where a receipt does not state VAT - a takeaway, a zero-rated purchase, a non-registered trader - no VAT is invented. The app never works a tax figure out from the difference between a subtotal and a total, because that guess is wrong often enough to matter when someone later relies on it.

SENT FROM YOUR OWN EMAIL

Sign in with Google or with a personal Microsoft account, and there is nothing to set up: no app password to hunt down, no server settings to type. Or use an app password with any provider that offers SMTP.

However you sign in, the app is only ever allowed to send. It cannot read, list or delete a single message in your mailbox. Receipts go out from you, so they land in your Sent folder and arrive from an address the recipient recognises.

NOTHING REACHES US

Delphi Commerce runs no server for this app. Your receipt images, the figures read from them and your credentials stay on your phone. Text recognition runs on the device. We are never a recipient of your email, and we hold none of your data.

We have added no adverts, no analytics and no tracking - not switched off, but not built in, and nothing that reports to us. One qualification: the Google Play services component that reads the receipt sends Google its own diagnostics, which we never see and cannot switch off.

WHAT IT COSTS

The first five sends are free. One payment then removes the limit for good. There is no subscription, no monthly fee and nothing further to buy.

WHO IT IS FOR

Anyone who has to account for what they spend and would rather not carry a wallet of fading thermal paper: the self-employed, contractors and freelancers, barristers and other professionals billing disbursements, and anyone whose accountant would prefer the receipt on the day it was spent rather than in a carrier bag the following spring.

IN THE APP

- Document scanner with automatic edge detection and straightening
- Merchant, date and amount filled in for you
- Net, VAT and gross captured separately when the receipt states them
- History grouped by month, with the VAT total for each
- Expense categories, including travel, subsistence, meals and entertainment, stationery and professional fees
- Multi-page receipts
- Editable subject and message templates
- Copy yourself on every send
- The reason shown when a send fails
- Send notifications you can switch off
- Works with Gmail, Outlook.com and any custom SMTP server

Receipt Scan is published by Delphi Commerce Limited. The privacy policy is at delphicommerce.com/receipt-scan/privacy/ and questions go to hello@delphicommerce.com, where a person answers them.