Manually typing in expenses from paper receipts is tedious and error-prone. One missed decimal, one forgotten item, and your spending data is off. Spensy solves this with AI-powered receipt scanning that turns a simple photo into a fully categorized expense — in seconds.
What Happens When You Upload a Receipt
When you snap a photo of a receipt in Spensy, it gets sent to GPT-4o Vision — OpenAI's multimodal model that can read and understand images. The AI analyzes the entire receipt and extracts structured data:
- Merchant name — the store or business where you made the purchase
- Purchase date — parsed into a standard format (YYYY-MM-DD) regardless of how the receipt prints it
- Total amount — the final amount you paid, validated against the sum of individual items
- Individual line items — each product or service with its name, quantity, and price
This isn't simple OCR (optical character recognition) that just reads text. GPT-4o Vision understands the structure and context of a receipt, so it can distinguish between item names, prices, taxes, and totals even on messy or faded receipts.
Automatic Category Assignment
Once the items are extracted, Spensy's AI assigns each one to a spending category. There are 15+ built-in categories:
- Groceries — with subcategories like Produce, Dairy, Meat, Pantry, Beverages, and Frozen
- Dining & Takeaway — restaurants, fast food, delivery
- Transportation — gas, parking, public transit
- Healthcare — pharmacy, medical supplies
- Entertainment, Shopping, Personal Care — and more
The categorization happens at the item level, not just the receipt level. If you buy groceries and cleaning supplies in the same trip, each item gets its own category. This gives you accurate spending breakdowns instead of lumping everything under one label.
Built-In Quality Checks
AI isn't perfect, and Spensy accounts for that. The system runs automatic quality checks on every scanned receipt:
- Amount mismatch detection — if the sum of individual items differs from the receipt total by more than 1%, Spensy flags it for review
- Illegible item detection — items that the AI can't read clearly get marked so you can fill in the details manually
- Status tracking — every receipt goes through a pipeline: pending → processed → verified. You can review and verify each one before it affects your reports
This means you always have the option to double-check what the AI extracted before trusting the data in your spending analytics.
Beyond Receipts: Bank Statement Import
Receipt scanning covers your day-to-day purchases, but what about recurring charges, online subscriptions, and transactions you don't have a receipt for? Spensy also supports PDF bank statement import.
Upload a bank statement and the AI extracts every transaction — merchant name, date, amount — and assigns a predicted category to each one. This fills the gaps that receipt scanning alone can't cover, giving you a complete picture of your spending.
Custom Categories for Your Workflow
The default categories work well for most people, but you can also create custom categories to match your specific needs. Running a small business? Add categories for Office Supplies, Client Dinners, or Software Subscriptions. You can also disable categories you don't use, so your workspace stays clean and relevant.
Try It Yourself
The best way to understand how AI receipt scanning works is to try it. Spensy offers a 14-day free trial — upload a few receipts and see how the AI handles them. No credit card required.