Frequently asked questions

As a new contender among receipt scanner & expense tracker apps in 2024, SparkReceipt offers an unique solution with an AI-driven digital receipt management. Using the very powerful ChatGPT AI, this receipt scanner app streamlines pre-accounting tasks, especially among international businesses working with multiple currencies at the same time. SparkReceipt is unique in its ability to read and understand any receipt or invoice in most languages and dates and prices in any format.

Designed as a small business receipt tracker, SparkReceipt primarily aids freelancers and small business owners. However, individuals or couples keen on finance also find its receipt scanning and expense tracking features handy.

SparkReceipt works for physical receipts, PDF receipts and email receipts (you can forward the receipts in your email to the app). The app can also scan CSVs, Excel files, Word documents and HTML files as needed, although these are more common in the business documents / bank statements feature of the app rather than receipts.

SparkReceipt offers both a free and a paid option. The free option enables you to use all features, but it’s limited to 15 smart AI scans per calendar month. With SparkReceipt Pro, you gain access to unlimited smart AI scans, and you can invite additional users to your account (team members, spouse, accountant etc.).

Yes, you can add your employees or co-founders to the app to collaborate on expenses and documents. Every Pro plan also includes a chance to invite accountants as read-only guest users to your account, eliminating the need for email attachments entirely.

Contributor users can submit documents, but cannot view, edit or download other members’ documents.

Member users can submit documents, and also view, edit and download all documents.

Accountant users can view, edit, review and download all your documents, and do not count towards your seat limit.

Yes, you can separate business and personal expenses in SparkReceipt. You can create multiple linked subaccounts (workspaces) under your main account to completely separate expenses between your different businesses or personal accounts.

Yes, with the SparkReceipt Pro plan you will have a personal inbound email address to send all your e-receipts and invoices to. They will be automatically scanned by the AI and added to your account.

Tip: you can easily set up auto-forwarding filters in e.g. Gmail or Gsuite to never worry about forwarding the emails again.

Absolutely. We ensure good data security with using best practices in encryption and storage. Your scanned receipts and documents are backed up, versioned and encrypted both in transit and in rest (= over the internet and while stored on disk).

However, as with any software system, we also recommend taking monthly exports of your data for added safety. Data exports are always available even on our free tier.

We are also based in the EU, are GDPR compliant and have signed data protection agreements with our 3rd party partners like OpenAI.

A “smart AI scan” in SparkReceipt refers to an advanced scanning feature that uses artificial intelligence to automatically recognize, extract, and categorize key information from receipts and invoices. Unlike a regular scan, which simply captures a digital image of a document, the smart AI scan processes the image to identify important details such as the merchant name, date, amount, and more. 

SparkReceipt’s scanning feature is designed to create digital copies of your receipts that are generally compliant with IRS guidelines, meaning that in most cases, you can rely on these digital copies for tax purposes and discard the physical receipts.

According to IRS regulations, digital copies of receipts are acceptable as long as they meet certain criteria:

Legibility and Accuracy: The scanned copies must be clear and legible, capturing all the necessary details such as the date, vendor name, amount, and nature of the expense. SparkReceipt’s smart AI scan feature is designed to ensure that the essential data is accurately captured and extracted from the scanned images.

Integrity of Records: The IRS requires that digital records must be stored in a way that prevents alteration after they are initially scanned. SparkReceipt’s system ensures that the scans are stored securely and are unaltered, maintaining the integrity of your financial records.

Accessibility and Readability: The digital records must be easily accessible and readable if needed for IRS reviews or audits. SparkReceipt organizes and stores your scanned receipts in a manner that allows for easy retrieval and display, complying with these requirements.

You can use credits to extract transactions from uploaded bank statements. Extracting the transactions allows SparkReceipt to match your receipts and invoices to the transactions found in your bank statement.

Pro-users start with 300 credits, which let you extract roughly 300 transactions. If you need more credits, please reach out to support@sparkreceipt.com.

Yes! Please see our Youtube channel.

Yes, you can download all your documents in Excel, CSV or PDF whenever needed. You can filter the documents based on date, payment method, user, etc.

Currently we support Quickbooks Online. Reach out to us if you have other needs for integrations.

Yes, you can use the mass upload feature for this and upload up to 100 documents at once. 

Currently this is best done with tags. A specific customer / client grouping is planned at some point but right now the easiest way is to:

• Add tags to expenses based on the client.
• Generate custom Excel/CSV/PDF reports with the web application by targeting the client tag.

This sort of thing becomes possible if you connect your accounting software. Currently, the only deeply integrated accounting platform is QuickBooks. With that you can sync your relevant GL accounts (Assets, Revenue & Liabilities, Expenses) and auto-categorize them into the cost/income categories pulled from QBO directly in the app. Otherwise, the auto-categorization is based on the internal and customizable expense and income categories.