Smart Receipts: Expenses & Tax

Tax time was easy at one point with this app. Everything is organized and it would take 30-60 minutes to get everything together rather than 3-6 hours. I had a situation 2 years ago where I lost 4-5 months of receipts but gave them the benefit of the doubt because their support team responded so quickly. But this app has been more nightmare than blessing for the last year. Between every receipt I’ve scanned in the last 5 years being removed then uploaded again, missing receipts that get stuck in the unattached file spinning for weeks/months and now scanning receipts that say they’ve been scanned and are done but are not there. This has been 2 year’s of tax time nightmares. I’ve downloaded several similar apps since and honestly this is the best of all of them. But that’s only when it is working correctly. I’ve lost dozens of receipts that I can’t recover and have gotten rid or and dozens of hours trying to find and rescan receipts into other apps. I have given too much time and have lost too much information to continue on.

No longer able to create or restore backups on your own device, must have subscription to use backups at all. No longer able to send PDFs to the app to add to receipt. Importing PDF from files fails to attach receipt. Unable to update I image/PDF on expense. Not all settings are preserved during upgrade. Sort order has been reversed, making it hard yo navigate to most recent reports (now at the bottom). Report name truncated when viewing report. Unable to reorder receipts in expense report. Not ready for mass deployment, wish I could go back. Avoid this update. Update: some issues were resolved in 5.0.1, but the most critical issue remains. It is not possible to use PDFs as receipts. Do not upgrade to 5.x until this is resolved. I have lost a critical part of my workflow, and I wish I could go back. People depend on this app, and they released an update that breaks it. Update: Version 5.0.2 does allow PDF receipts again, but only when browsing to find them. It is still not possible to send a PDF to Smart Receipts and attach it to an entry, which much simpler. It is also still not possible to manually back up or restore to your own storage, which had been possible prior to 5.x. Not allowing non-subscribers to back up or restore their data as previous versions had allowed is quite a gamble for the user.

The app works flawlessly with my IPhone 11 and I enjoyed taking pics of my receipts. It lets you write the amount in as well then, you can print a report. You choose how you want the report to come out. I liked it and was going to buy it but saw you could only buy a subscription at $11/year. I have to be honest and say I don’t like subscriptions. I prefer to buy the app outright. It enabled me to print a report to another app. The pics did not come out too clear but were still readable. If the developer could make the pics clearer it would be good. The camera on my iPhone does take very clear pictures so it was the app that did not focus on the receipts enough to produce clear pics.