Scanning receipts

Guides

Point the camera at a receipt, and Balanced fills in the merchant, total, date, category and the account you paid from. You check it and save.

Receipt scanning saves you the typing. Balanced reads the receipt on your device, suggests a transaction, and learns from what you change, so the next receipt from the same shop needs fewer taps.

Before you start

Two settings help Balanced find the account you paid from. You set them in the account, under Receipt Matching. See Accounts.

For each card, add its Last 4 digits to the account it pays from: your checking account for a debit card, the card’s own account for a credit card.
Turn on Cash Account for your wallet, so receipts paid in cash land there.

Scan a receipt

In the journal overview, tap 🧾 Scan Receipt in the bottom bar, or press ⌥⌘N on a keyboard. The camera opens and finds the edges of the receipt. For a long receipt, take several pictures from top to bottom; Balanced puts them together.
To use a photo you already have, touch and hold Scan Receipt and tap Choose Photo.

If Balanced isn’t allowed to use the camera, tapping the button opens your photos instead, and its menu says: Allow camera access in Settings to scan receipts.

Balanced then shows the photo with the title Reading receipt… while a light band sweeps over it. When it’s done, it marks what it found:

The merchant, and the category Balanced suggests for it.
The total. Subtotals, tax lines, deposit and change are skipped.
How you paid: the account Balanced picked (see How Balanced picks the accounts). Only if it found none does the label say Cash or show the card’s digits, such as “Card ••4821”.
The date of the purchase. Without one, Balanced uses today.

A moment later the transaction opens, filled in. Tap the photo to go on right away. Balanced only marks what it found: a receipt without a readable date simply gets no date label.

Check and save

The new transaction looks like one you typed yourself: the merchant as the Note, the category with the total, and the account you paid from, with its amount calculated. Each value that came from the receipt has a small scan symbol next to it until you change it.

Check it, change what’s wrong, and save. Nothing is saved before you do: close the editor without saving, and the scan is gone. Anything Balanced couldn’t find stays empty, and you fill it in yourself.

If the receipt can’t be read

When Balanced finds nothing it can use, it says Couldn't read this receipt and suggests: Make sure the whole receipt is visible and well lit.

Try Again opens the camera or your photos again.
Enter Manually opens an empty transaction.
Cancel closes it.

For the next try, lay the receipt flat in good light and hold the device straight above it.

How Balanced picks the accounts

The account you paid from, in this order:

The account with the card’s last 4 digits, if the receipt shows them.
Your Cash Account, if you paid in cash.
The account you used at this merchant last time.
The account you paid your most recent purchase from.

The category: the one you chose at this merchant last time. For a merchant Balanced doesn’t know yet, Apple Intelligence can suggest one of your categories, if your device has it. Otherwise the category stays empty.

The note: the name you saved last time, or the merchant’s name as printed, without legal forms such as “GmbH”.

Balanced learns from you

When you save a scanned transaction, Balanced remembers for this merchant:

the note you saved,
the category and the account you paid from, if the transaction has just these two lines,
which line holds the total, if you corrected the total to another amount on the receipt.

The next receipt from the same merchant is filled in that way. Changing a transaction later, after you’ve saved it, doesn’t change what Balanced has learned. For that, use the list below.

If the transaction has just a category and the account you paid from, and that isn’t your cash account, Balanced may also ask about the card digits after saving:

Remember ••4821 for Credit Card? if no account has these digits yet. Tap Remember to add them to the account you chose, or Not now.
••4821 is linked to Checking. Move it to Credit Card? if you chose another account than the one with these digits. Move or Keep.

Receipt merchants

Tap Edit next to Accounts in the journal overview, then Receipt Merchants at the bottom of the list. You see every merchant Balanced has learned, with its category and payment account.
Tap a merchant to edit it. Name is the note new transactions get.
Category and Payment: the accounts Balanced suggests for this merchant.
Total Line: The total line is the text before the amount, e.g. “zu zahlen”. Leave it empty to let Balanced find the total itself.

Swipe left on a merchant and tap Delete to forget it. The next receipt from that merchant starts from scratch. Until you’ve scanned something, the list says Merchants appear here as you scan receipts.

What stays on your device

Balanced reads the receipt on your device. The photo isn’t sent anywhere and isn’t kept after the scan.
Apple Intelligence, where available, also runs on your device. Without it, Balanced still reads receipts; it just can’t fill gaps its own rules leave, such as a missing total or date, or a category for a merchant it doesn’t know yet.
What Balanced learns, the merchants and the card digits, belongs to the journal. With iCloud sync it reaches your other devices, and in a shared journal everyone who shares it.

Balanced reads German, English and Spanish receipts, with amounts in either notation (1.234,56 or 1,234.56). It reads a date like 12/10/26 day first, as 12 October; month first, as on US receipts, only when it can’t be day first. Check the date on receipts from the US. It takes the total as printed, in the journal’s currency, without converting it. Its own rules only recognize amounts with two decimal places.