Most businesses still track expenses the same way they did a decade ago: a shoebox of crumpled receipts, a spreadsheet someone updates once a month, and a small panic at tax time. We thought that was a problem worth solving with AI — so we built Receiply, our own AI receipt scanner, and shipped it to both the App Store and Google Play. Here’s how, and what it says about the way we build.
The problem: receipts are still manual
Receipts are tiny, faded, and easy to lose. Typing them into a spreadsheet is tedious, and most “expense apps” want to plug straight into your bank account — which a lot of people understandably don’t want. We wanted something faster and more private: snap a photo, and let AI do the rest.
What Receiply does
- AI receipt scanning — point your camera at any receipt and AI extracts the merchant, line items, total and date automatically.
- Automatic categorisation — spending is sorted into clear categories with no manual tagging.
- Insights & smart budgets — monthly AI summaries show where the money actually goes, with budgets that adapt.
- Private by design — no bank login required. Your data stays your data.
How we built it
Receiply combines fast on-device image capture with AI-powered data extraction. When you scan a receipt, the image is processed and an AI model reads the structured data — merchant, items, amounts — and returns it in seconds. We layered a categorisation and insights engine on top so the raw data turns into something genuinely useful, not just a digital pile of receipts.
Two principles drove every decision. First, privacy: we deliberately avoided bank connections, because trust matters more than a marginally slicker onboarding. Second, calm UX: finance apps are usually noisy and stressful, so Receiply leads with one clear number — what you’ve spent — and lets you drill in only when you want to.
The hard parts
Real-world receipts are messy: thermal paper fades, photos are angled, and formats vary by country and merchant. Getting extraction accurate across that long tail — and handling it gracefully when a scan isn’t perfect — was the real engineering work, alongside keeping the whole experience fast and reliable on a phone.
Why this matters if you’re building an app
Receiply isn’t a demo — it’s a live product on the App Store and Google Play that real people use. It’s also proof of how we work: we take an idea, make sharp product decisions, integrate AI where it adds real value, and ship something polished and reliable.
That’s exactly what we do for clients too. If you’ve got an AI or mobile product in mind — whether it’s an MVP or a full build — tell us about it, or see more of our products and AI & automation work.