Shoeboxed meters scans and mails your paper for you, Expensify meters people and reimburses them. Shoeboxed runs from $97 to $1,997 a year, Expensify Collect is $5 per member a month on an annual plan. Upload a receipt below to see a third option: field level extraction priced per page, with no seat or scan cap.
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These two show up side by side in every receipt app roundup, yet they solve different problems. Shoeboxed is a document archive with a mail-in scanning service attached. Expensify is a reimbursement and approval system that happens to read receipts. Which one is cheaper depends on two things: whether your receipts are paper or already digital, and how many people need a login.
Shoeboxed Pro is $297 a year for 3 users and 200 digital scans a month, with overage at $0.15 a scan. Expensify Collect is $5 per member a month on an annual subscription and $10 pay per use, and it does not meter receipts at all. A solo owner with a heavy pile and a sales team filing a few receipts each land on opposite answers.
Starter at $97 a year covers one user and 30 digital scans a month, but QuickBooks Online and Xero connections start on Pro. If syncing to your books is the reason you are buying, the real entry price is $297 a year, not $97.
The Magic Envelope is the reason people pick Shoeboxed, and the allowance is thin at the bottom: one envelope a year and 20 paper scans a year on Starter. Extra envelopes are $9 each and paper overage is $1.50 to $2.00 a scan.
Shoeboxed exports receipt headers and syncs to a ledger. Expensify produces expense reports and pays people back. If the deliverable is vendor, date, tax, total and every line item as columns in Excel, both tools send you the long way round.
When your receipts are already photos, PDFs or email attachments and the job is turning them into data, you do not need a mail-in service or a reimbursement engine. Upload the pile, check the fields, and export a spreadsheet or a QuickBooks file without paying for seats or scan overage.
Starter is $49 a month, or $288 a year on annual billing, for 2,500 pages. That is about two cents a page by our arithmetic, and the rate does not change with the number of people uploading.
Every line on a receipt or supplier invoice comes back as its own row alongside vendor, date, subtotal, sales tax and total. No separate bundle to buy.
Download a clean spreadsheet with consistent headers, or a QuickBooks file, so the data lands in your books without a sync plan tier.
Each receipt gets an expense category and a normalized merchant name, so "AMZN MKTP US" and "Amazon.com" end up as the same vendor in your totals.
Upload up to 50 files at once, including multi page PDFs. A year of receipts is one afternoon of review, not twelve months of overage.
Monthly or annual, cancel anytime, every rate on the pricing page. Nothing to size with a sales rep.
Run your own numbers through these four checks. It takes about ten minutes and usually makes one option obviously cheaper.
If most of your receipts are paper and you will never scan them yourself, Shoeboxed is the only one of the two that does it for you. If they already arrive as photos, PDFs or emails, the Magic Envelope is a feature you are paying for and not using.
Tip: Count last month. If fewer than a fifth of receipts were paper, price both tools as if the envelope did not exist.
Expensify scales with members. Shoeboxed scales with scans and caps users by plan: 1 on Starter, 3 on Pro, 10 on Plus and Paper Plus. Write down both numbers before you open either pricing page.
If employees pay out of pocket and need money back through an approval chain, that is Expensify territory and Shoeboxed will not replace it. If nobody gets reimbursed, you are paying Expensify for machinery you will not use.
Add plan, overage and any seats you only need for approvers, then divide by a year of receipts. That cost per receipt is the only figure that puts a per member tool, a per scan tool and a per page tool on the same scale.
Every Shoeboxed figure below was read from the Shoeboxed pricing page. Every Expensify figure is the published per member rate for the annual subscription and for pay per use. Where a number is our own arithmetic on those rates, it says so.
You want paper gone and do not want to scan it yourself. The envelope allowance on your plan is the number that matters.
Approvals, mileage and payouts matter as much as capture, and per member pricing may genuinely be the cheaper answer here.
You need receipts turned into ledger rows for clients and a cost you can quote, without per user caps on the client side.
One person, hundreds of photos and PDFs. The exact shape where scan overage and seat pricing both charge for the wrong thing.
Buy Shoeboxed if you have paper receipts you want someone else to scan, and buy Expensify if you need to reimburse employees through an approval chain. Shoeboxed costs $9 to $179 a month, or $97 to $1,997 a year, metered by scans with a user cap on each plan. Expensify Collect costs $5 per member a month on an annual subscription and $10 pay per use, with no receipt meter. If your receipts are already digital and what you need is the data in a spreadsheet or in QuickBooks, a per page extraction tool costs less than either once you pass a few hundred receipts a month.
| Plan | Billing unit | Published US rate | Included volume | Users |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shoeboxed Starter | Per scan, capped | $9 a month or $97 a year | 30 digital scans a month, 20 paper scans a year, 1 envelope a year | 1 |
| Shoeboxed Pro | Per scan, capped | $29 a month or $297 a year | 200 digital, 20 paper a month, 1 envelope a quarter | 3 |
| Shoeboxed Plus | Per scan, capped | $79 a month or $797 a year | 750 digital, 50 paper a month, 1 envelope a month | 10 |
| Shoeboxed Paper Plus | Per scan, capped | $179 a month or $1,997 a year | 500 digital, 200 paper a month, 2 envelopes a month | 10 |
| Expensify Collect | Per member per month | $5 annual subscription, $10 pay per use | Not metered by receipt | Billed per member |
| Expensify Control | Per member per month | $9 annual subscription, $18 pay per use | Not metered by receipt | Billed per member |
| ReceiptOCR Starter | Per page | $49 a month or $288 a year | 2,500 pages a month | Not billed per user |
Paper Plus is the odd one in the Shoeboxed ladder: it costs more than Plus but allows fewer digital scans, 500 against 750, because the extra money buys paper capacity. If your paper volume is modest, Plus is the better Shoeboxed plan even though it sits lower on the page.
Shoeboxed costs $9 a month on Starter, $29 on Pro, $79 on Plus and $179 on Paper Plus. Annual billing brings those to $97, $297, $797 and $1,997 a year. Past the allowance, digital scans cost $0.30 on Starter, $0.15 on Pro and Paper Plus and $0.10 on Plus, paper scans cost $1.50 to $2.00, and extra envelopes are $9 each on every plan. QuickBooks Online and Xero sync start on Pro. All plans carry a 30 day money back guarantee.
Expensify Collect is $5 per member per month on an annual subscription and $10 per member pay per use. Control is $9 per member annual and $18 pay per use, and Expensify publishes conditions tied to Expensify Card spend and a twelve month commitment that bring Control down to the lower rate. Collect includes the QuickBooks Online and Xero connections. QuickBooks Desktop, NetSuite and Sage Intacct are Control features. Expensify bills at the start of each month for members who were active the previous month.
For one person with a light load, Shoeboxed Starter is hard to beat on price. For a team, Expensify is cheaper per receipt almost everywhere, because it never meters receipts. That is an honest point in Expensify favor, and the table below shows where it holds.
| Shape | Shoeboxed, annual | Expensify Collect, annual | ReceiptOCR, annual |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 person, 30 receipts a month | Starter, $97 | $60 for 1 member | Starter, $288 |
| 3 people, 200 receipts a month | Pro, $297, about $0.124 a receipt | $180, about $0.075 a receipt | Starter, $288, about $0.12 a receipt |
| 10 people, 750 receipts a month | Plus, $797, about $0.089 a receipt | $600, about $0.067 a receipt | Starter, $288, about $0.032 a receipt |
| 10 people, 2,000 receipts a month | Plus plus 1,250 overage scans at $0.10, about $2,297 | $600, about $0.025 a receipt | Starter, $288, about $0.012 a receipt |
| 1 person, 1,500 receipts a month | Plus plus 750 overage scans at $0.10, about $1,697 | $60 | Starter, $288 |
Everything in the table other than the plan prices is our arithmetic, assuming one page per receipt and Expensify Collect on an annual subscription. On pay per use, double the Expensify column. Two readings matter. First, at the bottom of the market, we are the most expensive of the three, and a solo user with 30 receipts a month should not buy us. Second, the last row flatters Expensify: $60 a year for 1,500 receipts is real, but what comes back is an expense report, not a spreadsheet with every line item in its own row.
Shoeboxed is a receipt archive for the owner or bookkeeper. You photograph, email, forward from Gmail or mail in paper, the receipts are digitized and stored, and the totals sync to QuickBooks Online or Xero on Pro and above. Expensify is built for the person who spent money and the manager who approves it: someone submits, a policy runs, an approver signs off, and money goes back to the employee. Shoeboxed keeps the record. Expensify moves the money.
No. Expensify reads receipts you photograph, upload or email in, and has no mail-in service. If the reason you are shopping is a physical pile you refuse to scan, Shoeboxed and its Magic Envelope are the only one of the two that solves it. Check the envelope allowance first, because Starter includes one envelope and 20 paper scans for the whole year.
There is a third shape both subscriptions price badly: one or two people with a large digital pile that just has to become data. No reimbursement, no approvals, no paper mailing. For that job, $49 a month covers 2,500 pages, line items come back as rows, and the export is an Excel, CSV or QuickBooks file. If you still want paper mailed and scanned, keep Shoeboxed for the paper and stop paying scan overage on receipts that were digital to begin with.
Related pages go deeper on each side. Shoeboxed alternative covers dropping the scan meter, and Expensify pricing walks the per member ladder with the Card discount conditions. For the same decision against a different rival, see Dext vs Expensify. If the receipts need to reach your books, scan receipts into QuickBooks covers the import, and bulk receipt scanner handles a year of backlog in one pass.
For an owner or bookkeeper who wants paper receipts scanned and archived with a sync to QuickBooks Online or Xero, yes. For a company that reimburses employees and needs approvals, no, Expensify is built for that. They are not competing for the same job, which is why feature checklists make them look tied.
Shoeboxed digitizes and stores receipts, including paper you mail in, and meters you by scans with a user cap per plan. Expensify collects employee expenses, runs approvals and reimburses people, and bills per member per month. Shoeboxed keeps the record, Expensify moves the money.
Shoeboxed is $9 a month on Starter, $29 on Pro, $79 on Plus and $179 on Paper Plus, or $97, $297, $797 and $1,997 a year. Digital scan overage runs $0.10 to $0.30 a scan, paper scans $1.50 to $2.00, and extra Magic Envelopes $9 each.
Expensify Collect is $5 per member a month on an annual subscription and $10 pay per use. Control is $9 per member annual and $18 pay per use. Control reaches the lower rate through a twelve month commitment and Expensify Card spend conditions.
For one person at 30 receipts a month, Shoeboxed Starter at $97 a year is cheap, though Expensify Collect for one member is $60. For teams, Expensify is cheaper per receipt because it does not meter receipts: 10 members on Collect annual is $600 a year against $797 for Shoeboxed Plus.
Yes, on Pro and above. Shoeboxed Pro, Plus and Paper Plus connect to QuickBooks Online and Xero. The $97 a year Starter plan has no accounting sync, so if QuickBooks is the reason you are buying, Pro at $297 a year is the real entry price.
No. Expensify reads receipts you photograph, upload or email in. It has no mail-in scanning service. If you want paper handled for you, Shoeboxed and its Magic Envelope do that, within the paper scan allowance of your plan.
A prepaid envelope you fill with paper receipts and mail to Shoeboxed for scanning. Starter includes one a year, Pro one a quarter, Plus one a month and Paper Plus two a month. Extra envelopes are $9 each, and paper scans count against a separate paper allowance.
Expensify offers free individual plans that include SmartScan, and its annual report describes an optional paid upgrade for anyone scanning more than 25 receipts in a month. A business workspace on Collect is $5 per member a month on an annual subscription.
Some businesses do, Shoeboxed for the owner paper archive and Expensify for staff reimbursement. Check you are not paying twice to read the same receipts, which is the most common overlap when a company adds the second tool without auditing the first.
If your receipts are already photos, PDFs or emails, a per page extraction tool avoids scan overage and user caps. ReceiptOCR Starter is $49 a month for 2,500 pages, about two cents a page by our arithmetic, with line items and QuickBooks export included.
No. Both wrap receipt reading in workflow you may not use: an archive and mail service in one case, approvals and reimbursement in the other. If the output you want is vendor, date, tax, total and line items as spreadsheet columns, buy extraction priced per page.
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Receipt extraction without a scan meter or a user cap.
The full per member ladder and the Card discount conditions.
The same decision against a per document capture tool.
What changes when receipts stop being priced per person.
The other paper-first receipt tool buyers put next to Shoeboxed.
Turn a year of receipts into one spreadsheet in a single pass.
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