SmartScan is the receipt scanner inside Expensify, and its real limits sit in SEC filings rather than on the pricing page. The free Track and Submit plans cap SmartScan at 25 receipts in a month, unlimited scanning is a paid upgrade, and SmartScan returns the merchant, date and total without breaking a receipt into line items. Upload a batch below and see every field come back with no monthly scan counter.
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SmartScan is genuinely good at the job it was built for: one person, one phone, one receipt at a time. Three limits show up once receipt volume is a real part of the month, and none of the three are printed on the plan comparison most buyers read.
The Expensify FY2025 annual report describes the Track and Submit plans as free plans that carry, in its own words, an optional paid monthly upgrade for anyone wishing to SmartScan more than 25 receipts in a given month. The number circulated in most blog posts is 5. The filing says 25, and it says unlimited SmartScan is the thing the upgrade buys.
Expensify documents SmartScan as transcribing a receipt so an expense can be created from it: merchant, date and amount. Nowhere in the product documentation or the annual report is line level extraction described. If you code spend by category, split a shared bill, or need per line sales tax, the itemized half of the receipt is still a manual job.
Expensify bills at the start of each month based on members who were active in the previous month, at a published flat rate of 5 dollars per member per month on Collect. A bookkeeper closing one heavy client pays the same seat price as a colleague who filed two receipts, because the meter runs on people rather than on documents.
Much of what makes SmartScan feel automatic is credit card matching, which the annual report describes as matching receipts and emails to incoming card transactions in real time. That value depends on the card feed already being in Expensify. A shoebox of receipts with no matching transaction is back to plain transcription.
ReceiptOCR does the extraction half of the job without a seat count or a scan counter. Drop in a batch of receipts, review the fields, and export Excel, CSV, or a QuickBooks ready file. It sits alongside Expensify happily if you keep Expensify for approvals and reimbursement.
Upload a folder of receipts in one action instead of photographing them individually. The whole batch is read and returned as a single table you can sort, total and check before export.
Every line on an itemized receipt comes back as its own row with its own amount, so category coding and bill splitting start from data rather than from squinting at a photo.
There is no monthly scan counter to watch and no upgrade prompt at receipt 26. Your page allowance is pooled across the account rather than rationed per person.
Pricing follows document volume, not headcount. Adding a reviewer or a second bookkeeper does not change what the month costs.
Export a clean spreadsheet or a QuickBooks ready file directly, without routing every receipt through an expense report first.
Tax is returned as a separate value rather than folded into the total, which is the field most receipt scanners quietly leave for you to type.
You do not have to leave Expensify to fix the scanning bottleneck. Most teams keep the approval and reimbursement workflow and move only the reading of documents.
Pull a month of expenses and divide the receipt count by the number of people who filed. Compare that figure against 25, the free plan SmartScan ceiling named in the annual report. If most filers sit under 25 and one or two sit far above it, the problem is concentrated and you do not need to change plans for everyone.
Tip: Count the heaviest month rather than the average. The upgrade prompt arrives in the heavy month, not the typical one.
Look at how your chart of accounts treats a grocery run, a hardware store trip or a client dinner. If a single receipt has to split across two or more accounts, SmartScan alone will not get you there, because it transcribes the receipt to a total rather than to its lines.
Upload the accumulated receipts here in one pass and export a spreadsheet. This is the piece that scales badly inside a phone first scanner, because every document costs a separate photograph and a separate confirmation tap.
Bring the exported file into your ledger or back into Expensify as expenses. Approvals, policy rules and reimbursement stay exactly where they are, and only the transcription step changes.
Plan structure and scanning limits below are quoted from the Expensify FY2025 annual report filed with the SEC, and rates from Expensify published plan communications. Figures we could not trace to an Expensify source are marked as not published rather than estimated.
You want to know exactly where free ends. It ends at 25 SmartScans in a month, after which unlimited scanning is a paid upgrade rather than a hard block.
Your volume is concentrated at month end and arrives as a pile, not as a stream of phone photos. Batch extraction and line level detail matter more to you than a mobile capture flow.
Expensify bills on members active in the previous month, so your bill tracks who filed rather than how many licenses you bought. Peak active filers is the number to budget from.
Restaurant, grocery and hardware receipts carry the detail your categories need. If the scanner stops at the total, someone reopens the photo and types the rest.
Expensify separates free individual plans from paid company plans. The annual report describes billing at the start of each month based on members who were active in the previous month, with a choice between a pay per use plan billed at a flat rate for each active member and an annual plan that commits to a minimum number of monthly seats in exchange for a discount.
| Plan | Published rate | SmartScan allowance | What it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Track (free) | $0 | 25 receipts per month, then a paid upgrade for unlimited | Individuals and sole proprietors tracking receipts and mileage |
| Submit (free) | $0 | 25 receipts per month, then a paid upgrade for unlimited | Track plus automatic submission of reports for reimbursement |
| Collect | $5 per member per month | Not separately metered | Accounting integrations, simple approval workflows, ACH reimbursement |
| Control | Custom, described as as low as $9 per active member per month | Not separately metered | Rules based approvals plus travel, HR and ERP integrations |
Plan structure, the 25 receipt SmartScan upgrade threshold and the active member billing basis are quoted from the Expensify FY2025 annual report. The $5 Collect rate and the as low as $9 Control figure come from Expensify published plan communications. No undiscounted Control rate is published anywhere, so none is shown here.
Twenty five in a given month. The Expensify FY2025 annual report describes the free Track and Submit plans as including an optional paid monthly upgrade for anyone wishing to SmartScan more than 25 receipts in a given month, and labels the free tier as carrying an optional upgrade for unlimited SmartScan. The figure of 5 free scans repeated across many comparison articles does not appear in the filing or on the plan page.
Expensify describes SmartScan as transcribing a receipt so an expense can be created from it, and the annual report frames the goal as fire and forget receipt capture. That is a totals level read. The table below sets the documented SmartScan output against the fields a dedicated extraction tool returns.
| Field | Expensify SmartScan | ReceiptOCR |
|---|---|---|
| Merchant name | Yes | Yes |
| Transaction date | Yes | Yes |
| Total amount | Yes | Yes |
| Currency | Yes, any currency per the filing | Yes |
| Individual line items | Not documented | Yes, one row per line |
| Sales tax as its own field | Not documented | Yes |
| Batch upload of many receipts | Photo, email forward or attachment upload, per document | Yes, whole folder in one pass |
| Direct spreadsheet export | Via expense report export | Excel or CSV directly |
Both, historically. This is the least known fact about the Expensify receipt scanner and it comes straight from the company financial statements. Expensify lists outsourcing costs to support our patented scanning technology SmartScan inside its cost of revenue, and the FY2025 annual report attributes part of its cost movement to a decrease in SmartScan costs due to increased use of AI instead of human agents. Receipts that the model was not confident about have been reviewed by outsourced human agents, and Expensify has been shifting that work to AI.
That matters for two practical reasons. It explains why SmartScan has historically been slower than a pure model, since a queued human review takes minutes rather than seconds, and it explains why the free tier carries a hard scan ceiling at all: unlike pure inference, human review has a real marginal cost per receipt.
Twenty five receipts a month is roughly one receipt per working day. A single business trip with flights, two hotels, ground transport and a week of meals will typically clear it on its own.
| Situation | Receipts per month | Free SmartScan covers it? |
|---|---|---|
| Sole proprietor, occasional supplies | 5 to 15 | Yes |
| One week of business travel | 25 to 40 | No, upgrade needed that month |
| Field technician or trades van | 40 to 80 | No |
| Bookkeeper closing one client month | 150 to 400 | No, and per person seats price badly here |
Yes, on the free Track plan, up to 25 receipts a month. Track is described in the filing as coming with SmartScan receipt scanning functionality and being used primarily by individuals and sole proprietors. Past that ceiling the choice is the paid unlimited SmartScan upgrade or a separate extraction tool, and past a few hundred receipts a month the per member seat model stops matching the shape of the work entirely.
Keeping both is normal and usually cheaper than upgrading everyone. Expensify remains the place approvals, policy rules and reimbursement live, which is what the Collect and Control plans are actually sold for. The heavy, repetitive reading of a stack of documents moves to a tool priced per document. If your books run through QuickBooks, the Expensify QuickBooks integration page covers how the export side behaves, and Expensify pricing breaks down the seat model in full.
Twenty five in a given month. The Expensify FY2025 annual report describes the free Track and Submit plans as including an optional paid monthly upgrade for anyone wishing to SmartScan more than 25 receipts in a given month. The commonly repeated figure of 5 free scans does not appear in any Expensify source.
Not on the free plans. Expensify labels its free tier as carrying an optional upgrade for unlimited SmartScan, which means unlimited scanning is a paid feature rather than the default. Paid company plans are billed per active member rather than per scan, so scanning is not separately metered there.
No line level extraction is documented. Expensify describes SmartScan as transcribing a receipt so an expense can be created from it, which is a merchant, date and total read. If you need each line on an itemized receipt as its own row with its own amount, that is a job for a dedicated extraction tool.
Track and Submit are free. The Collect plan is published at a flat 5 dollars per member per month. Control is quoted rather than listed and has been described as as low as 9 dollars per active member per month, with no undiscounted rate published. Billing runs at the start of each month on members who were active the previous month.
Both, historically. Expensify includes outsourcing costs to support SmartScan in its cost of revenue, and its FY2025 annual report credits part of a cost decrease to increased use of AI instead of human agents. Low confidence receipts have been routed to human reviewers, and that work is being shifted to models.
Because a scan that the model is unsure about has historically been queued for human review, which the company financial statements describe funding through outsourcing. A model returns a receipt in seconds, while a queued review returns in minutes. Expensify says it is moving that step toward AI.
Not as a single batch read. Expensify describes capture as snapping a photo, forwarding receipts from email, or uploading attachments in the application, and each document is handled individually. Batch extraction of a folder in one pass is what a dedicated receipt scanner does differently.
Yes, on the free Track plan up to 25 receipts a month. The filing describes Track as including SmartScan receipt scanning and being used mainly by individuals and sole proprietors. Beyond that ceiling you either buy the unlimited SmartScan upgrade or run extraction somewhere priced per document.
Expensify states SmartScan works no matter the currency or quality of handwriting, which is a strong claim and one reason human review sat in the pipeline. No accuracy percentage is published for SmartScan by Expensify or, for that matter, by any major receipt OCR vendor.
Scanning does not stop permanently. Expensify presents an optional paid monthly upgrade for unlimited SmartScan in that month. You can also enter the expense manually or attach the image without transcription, which keeps the record but leaves the typing to you.
Often yes for anyone with concentrated volume. Expensify prices on people who filed, so a bookkeeper processing 300 receipts costs the same seat as a colleague filing two. Moving the reading step to a tool priced per document keeps approvals and reimbursement in Expensify while removing the bottleneck.
Yes, through expense report exports rather than as a direct scan to spreadsheet action. If the goal is a clean spreadsheet of extracted fields rather than a filed expense report, extracting straight to Excel or CSV skips the report building step entirely.
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The per member seat model in full, sourced from Expensify SEC filings.
Receipt extraction without a per member monthly seat.
How Expensify exports to QuickBooks Online and Desktop, and where it breaks.
Read a folder of receipts in one pass instead of one photo at a time.
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