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FOBIE.ai

Turn a pile of receipts into something my accountant can use

A glovebox, a carrier bag and a photo roll full of receipts, and a deadline. This job is about photographing them once and getting rows of data out the other end.

What a good result looks like

Use this to judge a demo. A tool that cannot do these is not doing the job, whatever it is called.

  • You photograph a crumpled receipt with your phone and it reads it correctly.
  • It pulls out date, supplier, total and VAT separately.
  • It handles a page of several receipts at once.
  • It exports in a format your accountant already accepts, or connects straight to your bookkeeping.
  • It shows you what it was unsure about instead of guessing silently.

What usually goes wrong

The things people find out after they have paid.

  • Accuracy on faded till receipts is the whole game, and it is the thing demos never show. Test with your worst ten, not your best ten.
  • Per-document pricing adds up fast if you file a lot of small receipts.
  • Check how long images are kept and whether you can get them all back out.

3 tools that do this

How this list is ordered — and why money is not one of the reasons
  1. 1. How squarely the tool does this job. A tool built for this job comes before one that can be made to do it. A tool that needs wiring up comes last.
  2. 2. How much we actually know about it. A tool we have used ourselves comes before one we have only researched, which comes before one only a reader has written in about, which comes before one nobody has assessed. A tool low on this list is not bad. It is unknown.
  3. 3. How technical you need to be. Where the first two signals tie, the one a non-technical person can set up alone comes first. This site is for people who are not going to write code.
  4. 4. How recently we checked the listing. A listing we checked last month is worth more to you than one we checked last year, so it breaks the remaining ties. Listings we have never checked come last.

Nothing commercial appears on that list, and nothing commercial is given to the code that orders it. How we make money, and how you can check.

  1. Dext

    by Dext

    Built for this one job, and the one accountants most often ask their clients to use.

    Built for thisListed, not reviewedNo setup help needed

  2. QuickBooks Online

    by Intuit

    Snap receipts in the app and match them to transactions.

    Does this wellListed, not reviewedSome setting up

  3. Xero

    by Xero

    It captures receipts itself, though a specialist does it better on bad ones.

    Does this wellListed, not reviewedSome setting up

Reviews against this job

Listed, not reviewedIt is in the directory. Nobody here has assessed it yet.

Nobody here has assessed any of these tools against this job yet. The listings above describe what each one is sold to do and how squarely it fits — which is real information — but none of it is a verdict, and this page does not pretend otherwise.

Used one of these for this job? Tell us what happened — reader reports are published as reader reports, in your words, clearly labelled.

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