Does Wave Have a Receipt Scanner? Cost, Limits, Line Items

Yes, Wave has a receipt scanner. It uses OCR to read an uploaded receipt and create an expense transaction automatically. It runs on Wave's paid Receipts plan or the Pro plan, not on the free Starter plan, and what it hands back is header-level: a date, a description, an account, a category, and one total amount. It does not extract line items.

Last updated July 2026. All Wave prices and limits below come from Wave's own pricing page and Help Center.

Is Wave receipt scanning free?

No. Wave's Starter plan is genuinely free, and that is why most small businesses are on it, but receipt scanning is not one of the things it includes. You need either the Receipts plan or the Pro plan. There is one thing you can do for nothing: attaching a receipt image to a transaction you already have. Attaching is storage. Scanning is extraction. They are different features and only one of them saves you typing.

How much does Wave Receipts cost?

Wave publishes these figures for the United States. Canadian pricing differs, and Wave's paid features are supported only in the US and Canada.

If receipts are the only reason you are considering an upgrade, the $8 Receipts plan is the cheaper door. Pro is worth it for the other things it carries, not for the scanner. Check Wave's pricing page before you commit, because these numbers move.

Does Wave use OCR for receipts?

Yes. Wave describes smart OCR that extracts and organizes receipt data, and its Help Center confirms every upload automatically creates an expense transaction for you to verify and mark as reviewed. Wave also merges a scanned receipt with a matching expense from your connected bank feed, so a card purchase does not book twice.

There is a gap between the marketing language and the documentation, and it is worth noticing. The marketing says the OCR extracts and organizes your data. The help articles only ever name five things you verify on a scanned receipt: date, description, account, category, and total amount. When a company's marketing is vaguer than its documentation, the documentation is the product.

Does Wave extract line items from receipts?

No. Wave does not document line-item extraction anywhere, and a scanned receipt becomes one expense transaction carrying one number. A $312 warehouse-club run books as $312, not as the eleven things in the cart.

For a lot of receipts that is completely fine. One merchant, one purpose, one number, done. It stops being fine the moment a single receipt mixes categories. A big-box run with office supplies, a laptop, and groceries for the break room is three different tax treatments on one piece of paper, and only the itemized detail tells you how to split it. Same story with sales tax you need broken out by category, with inventory purchases that have to land against real SKUs, and with any receipt where part of the spend was personal.

How do I scan receipts in Wave?

Wave documents three ways in, and all three need a paid Receipts or Pro plan.

• Photograph the receipt in the Wave mobile app.
• Upload files in a browser from the Receipts section of the left-side menu.
• Forward the receipt by email.

However it arrives, Wave creates a draft expense transaction. You open it, check or correct the fields, and mark it as reviewed. The review step is not optional busywork, it is the only place a wrong total gets caught before it reaches your books.

How do I email receipts to Wave?

Forward it to [email protected]. The one rule that trips people up: the email has to be sent from the primary email address on your Wave account. Send it from a second address and Wave cannot match it to you, so it silently never appears. This is the path worth automating, because a supplier's emailed PDF receipt can be forwarded the second it lands, without printing or photographing anything.

What file formats does Wave accept for receipts?

JPG, JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIF, TIFF, PDF, and HEIC. The limits are 5 MB per file and 10 files per upload. HEIC matters more than it looks, because it is the default iPhone photo format, so receipts shot on an iPhone go straight in without a conversion step.

Can I bulk upload receipts to Wave?

Up to ten at a time. That is Wave's documented cap and there is no larger batch mode behind it. A shoebox of a hundred receipts is ten separate upload rounds, each followed by ten transactions to review. If you are catching up a whole year at tax time, that is an afternoon, and it is the point at which running the stack through a bulk receipt scanner and keeping the spreadsheet starts to look like the shorter path.

How do I attach a receipt to a transaction in Wave?

Open the Transactions page, click into the transaction, and upload the file against it. This works on any plan, free ones included, because storing an image is not scanning it. It is also enough for recordkeeping on its own: the IRS accepts legible electronic copies of receipts under Revenue Procedure 97-22, so a clear scan attached to the right transaction is a valid record. Just be clear about what attaching does not do, which is give you any data. The numbers still have to come from somewhere, and if it is not the scanner, it is you.

What happened to the Wave Receipts app?

Wave retired the standalone Receipts by Wave mobile app back in 2021 and folded receipt capture into the main Wave app and the web interface. If you are hunting the App Store for a separate receipts app, that is why you cannot find it. Everything lives under Receipts in the main product now.

Does Wave have a receipts API?

No. Wave publishes a GraphQL API that covers invoices, customers, products, transactions, and accounts, and its documented surface contains no receipts or OCR endpoint. Practically, that means two things. Nobody can build a tool that pushes structured receipt data into Wave for you. And there is no supported way to pull your receipt data back out in bulk if you ever leave. Your receipts live in Wave as images attached to transactions.

That second point is the one people discover at the wrong moment. If you think you might move to another ledger in a year or two, keeping your own extracted spreadsheet alongside Wave costs nothing and makes the eventual migration a copy rather than a rescan.

Getting more out of a Wave receipt

The workflow that solves the line-item gap without fighting Wave is to read the receipt properly once, then let Wave hold the summary. Run the batch through a receipt OCR tool that returns the vendor, date, sales tax, total, and every line with its quantity and price, export it as one sheet with a receipt to Excel converter, and keep that file as the searchable version your accountant will actually ask for at year end. Attach the original image to the Wave transaction for the record. You have now typed nothing.

Cash and out-of-pocket purchases that never touched a connected bank feed have one more documented route in. Wave accepts a CSV upload under Transactions, Upload a statement, in a simple layout of date, description, and amount. If your starting point is a PDF from the bank rather than a spreadsheet, you will need to convert the PDF statement into a clean CSV first, since Wave will not read a PDF here. Point the upload at the right account, and watch for duplicates if that account also has a live bank feed attached.

None of this is a knock on Wave. It gives away a real double-entry ledger for nothing, which is a remarkable deal, and its scanner is a reasonable $8 convenience for receipts that are one merchant and one number. It just was never built to tell you what was in the bag. For a fuller walkthrough of the extract-then-file workflow, including which fields to keep, see scan receipts into Wave. If you keep a second set of books, the same export feeds them, and you can scan receipts into QuickBooks from the identical file.