Wave scans a receipt into a single expense transaction with a date, a description, and one total. That is enough to book the expense and nothing more. Upload the same receipts here and AI reads the vendor, the date, the sales tax, and every line on the ticket, then exports a clean Excel, CSV, or JSON file you keep, attach, or import.
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Wave's receipt scanning is real OCR and it works, but it is deliberately shallow. Its own Help Center documents what an uploaded receipt becomes: one expense transaction you verify and mark as reviewed. The detail on the ticket never leaves the image.
Wave's help documentation describes the fields you verify on a scanned receipt as the date, description, account, category, and total amount. Line items are not among them. A $312 warehouse-club run books as one number, not as the eleven things you actually bought.
Receipt scanning is not in Wave's free Starter plan. Wave publishes a Receipts plan at $8 per month or $72 per year, and includes scanning in the Pro plan at $19 per month or $190 per year. The scanner you are paying for still returns a total.
Wave documents a limit of 10 files per upload and 5 MB per file. A shoebox of a hundred receipts is ten separate upload rounds before you have booked a single transaction.
Wave publishes a GraphQL API covering invoices, customers, products, transactions, and accounts. There is no documented receipts or OCR endpoint, so there is no supported way to push scanned receipt data in or pull structured receipt data out.
Read the receipt once, properly, into structured fields. Keep the spreadsheet for your accountant and your tax file, attach the image to the Wave transaction, and stop retyping what the scanner threw away.
Description, quantity, and unit price for each line on the ticket, plus subtotal, sales tax, and total. This is the layer Wave's scanner does not return.
Upload a folder of receipts in one pass instead of ten rounds of ten files. Each document is read separately, so accuracy holds across the batch.
One stacked sheet with a consistent header row. Sort it, pivot it, hand it to a bookkeeper, or feed it into whatever you keep books in next year.
Wave separates receipts from bills. The same extraction reads an out-of-pocket lunch receipt and a supplier invoice, and both land in the same sheet.
Check the vendor, date, tax, and total before the file leaves. Fixing a number in review beats unwinding a booked transaction.
Because the data leaves as a spreadsheet rather than living inside one ledger, migrating to QuickBooks or Xero later does not mean rescanning three years of receipts.
Extract first, then decide what Wave needs to see. The ledger only ever receives data you have already checked.
Add paper, PDF, and photo receipts in one batch. Supplier invoices can go in the same run. The engine reads each document on its own.
Tip: Keep out-of-pocket employee receipts separate from supplier invoices so each exports as its own sheet.
Check the vendor, date, sales tax, total, and the line detail. Export Excel or CSV with a header row that stays identical every month.
Keep the sheet as your searchable record and tax backup, attach the original image to the matching Wave transaction, or bring cash purchases in through Wave's documented CSV statement upload.
Built for US small businesses and freelancers on Wave who need more out of a receipt than the number at the bottom.
You run Wave's free plan on purpose. Paying a monthly add-on to have a scanner read one total off a receipt is not the upgrade you were looking for.
A single warehouse-club or hardware-store ticket carries business supplies and personal items. Splitting it needs the lines, not the total.
Categorizing a year of purchases by expense type is a spreadsheet job. It is far easier when each receipt arrives already broken into what was actually bought.
Wave has no receipts API and no receipt data export. A spreadsheet of extracted receipts is portable in a way a ledger attachment is not.
Yes. Wave has built-in OCR receipt scanning that turns an uploaded receipt into an expense transaction automatically. It is not free, though: scanning requires either Wave's Receipts plan or the Pro plan. And by Wave's own Help Center, what you get back is header-level data you verify and mark as reviewed, not a breakdown of the purchase.
No. Wave's Starter plan is free, but receipt scanning is not included in it. Wave publishes a Receipts plan at $8 per month or $72 per year in the United States, and it bundles scanning into the Pro plan at $19 per month or $190 per year. Prices are Wave's own published US figures; Canadian pricing differs, and Wave's paid features are limited to the US and Canada.
Here is what Wave publishes for the United States, alongside what each tier actually gives you for receipts.
| Wave plan | US price | Receipt scanning | Line items extracted |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $0 | Not included | No |
| Receipts plan | $8/mo or $72/yr | Included | No, header fields only |
| Pro | $19/mo or $190/yr | Included | No, header fields only |
Wave has not published an accuracy figure or a processing-time commitment for its scanner, so treat both as unknown until you test it on your own receipts. Pricing changes; check Wave's pricing page before you commit.
Yes. Wave describes smart OCR technology that extracts and organizes receipt data, and its Help Center confirms each upload automatically creates an expense transaction. The gap between the marketing and the documentation is the interesting part: the marketing says it extracts and organizes the data, while the help articles only ever document a date, a description, an account, a category, and a total amount. Where the two disagree, the documentation is what the product does.
Compare the fields Wave documents against the fields a receipt actually carries. The right column is the reason this page exists.
| Field | Wave receipt scanning | ReceiptOCR |
|---|---|---|
| Date | Yes | Yes |
| Merchant or description | Yes, as a description | Yes, as a vendor field |
| Total amount | Yes | Yes |
| Sales tax as its own field | Not documented | Yes |
| Line items with quantity and price | No | Yes |
| Spreadsheet export | No receipt data export | Excel, CSV, JSON |
| Files per upload | 10, at 5 MB each | Batch a folder |
Wave documents three ways in, and all three need a paid Receipts or Pro plan. Capture a photo in the Wave mobile app. Upload files in a browser from the Receipts section in the left-side menu. Or forward the receipt by email. Whichever you use, Wave creates an expense transaction you then open, verify or edit, and mark as reviewed. Wave also merges a scanned receipt with a matching expense transaction from your bank feed so the same purchase does not book twice.
Forward the receipt to [email protected]. Wave requires that the email be sent from the primary email address on your Wave account, otherwise it will not be matched to you and will not appear in your Receipts list. This is the path most people automate, because a supplier's emailed PDF receipt can be forwarded the moment it lands without ever being printed or photographed.
Wave documents JPG, JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIF, TIFF, PDF, and HEIC. The hard limits are 5 MB per file and 10 files per upload. HEIC matters more than it sounds: it is the default iPhone photo format, so receipts photographed on an iPhone go in without converting anything first.
Up to a point. Wave supports bulk-uploading 10 receipts at a time, which is the documented cap. There is no larger batch mode and no receipts API to script around it, so a year of receipts is a long afternoon of ten-file rounds. Extracting the batch elsewhere and keeping the spreadsheet is usually the faster route to the thing you actually wanted, which is a categorized record of what you spent.
Open the Transactions page, click into the transaction, and upload the receipt file against it. This works on any plan, because attaching an image is storage rather than scanning. It is worth knowing the difference: attaching the image satisfies your recordkeeping, and the IRS accepts legible electronic copies under Revenue Procedure 97-22, but attaching does not extract anything. The data still has to come from somewhere.
Wave retired the standalone Receipts by Wave mobile app in 2021 and folded receipt capture into the main Wave app and the web interface. If you are searching for the separate app, that is why you cannot find it. Everything now lives under Receipts in the main product.
Be clear-eyed about what is possible. Wave has no receipts API and no documented way to push structured receipt data into the ledger, so nobody can write your extracted line items straight into Wave. What you can do is documented and useful. Attach the original image to the transaction for your records. Keep the exported spreadsheet as the searchable, sortable version your accountant will actually want at year end. And for cash or out-of-pocket purchases that never touched a connected bank feed, Wave accepts a CSV upload of transactions through Transactions, Upload a statement, in a documented layout of date, description, and amount. Point it at the right account and watch for duplicates if that account is also connected to a bank feed.
If you keep books somewhere else as well, the same export feeds them. Teams reconciling in Intuit's ledger scan receipts into QuickBooks from the same file, Xero users take the Xero receipt path that Hubdoc leaves incomplete, batches go through the bulk receipt scanner, and the underlying receipt OCR API returns the same fields as JSON when the output feeds an application instead of a spreadsheet.
Wave earned its users by being genuinely free for the things most small businesses need, and its receipt scanner is a fair deal for anyone whose receipts are simple: one merchant, one purpose, one number. The moment a receipt carries several categories, sales tax you need to break out, or a mix of business and personal items, the header total stops being enough and someone starts retyping. That is the job this replaces. Extract every line once, keep the spreadsheet, and let Wave hold the summary transaction and the image.
Yes. Wave has OCR receipt scanning that turns an upload into an expense transaction, available on the paid Receipts plan or the Pro plan. It is not part of the free Starter plan. Wave's Help Center documents the fields you verify as date, description, account, category, and total amount, so it captures the header of a receipt rather than its line items.
No. Wave's Starter plan is free but excludes receipt scanning. Wave publishes a US Receipts plan at $8 per month or $72 per year, and includes scanning in the Pro plan at $19 per month or $190 per year. Attaching a receipt image to an existing transaction is available without a paid plan, but attaching is storage, not extraction.
Yes, three documented ways. Photograph one in the Wave mobile app, upload files in a browser from the Receipts section of the left-side menu, or forward the receipt to [email protected] from the primary email address on your account. All three require a paid Receipts or Pro plan, and each upload is capped at 10 files of 5 MB each.
No. Wave nowhere documents line-item extraction. Its help articles describe a scanned receipt becoming a single expense transaction with a date, description, account, category, and total amount. If you need the individual products, quantities, and unit prices, for a mixed purchase or for sales-tax breakdown, that detail has to be extracted separately.
No. Wave publishes a GraphQL API covering invoices, customers, products, transactions, and accounts, but its documented surface includes no receipts or OCR endpoint. There is no supported way to push scanned receipt data into Wave or pull structured receipt data out of it programmatically.
Ten, at up to 5 MB per file. That is Wave's documented bulk-upload limit and there is no larger batch mode. Accepted formats are JPG, JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIF, TIFF, PDF, and HEIC, which covers iPhone photos without conversion.
Wave retired the standalone Receipts by Wave mobile app in 2021 and moved receipt capture into the main Wave mobile app and the web interface. There is no separate receipts app to download today.
Wave's paid features, including receipt scanning, payments, and payroll, are supported in the United States and Canada only. Wave stopped supporting users outside those two countries for paid functionality, and it publishes pricing in US and Canadian dollars.
The QuickBooks path, native capture and CSV import compared.
Bring itemized receipt data into Xero that Hubdoc skips.
Import itemized receipt data into FreshBooks on any plan.
Turn a stack of receipts into one clean spreadsheet.
Batch a month of receipts past any ten-file cap.
Read receipts into Excel and CSV in the browser.
