Receipts Space for iPhone and iPad

Receipts Space is coming to iPhone and iPad. The app works in the very same library your Mac keeps: nothing is copied, nothing is uploaded on top, nothing has to be reconciled by hand.

It is a companion to the Mac version, not a program of its own. The heavy lifting - reports, bookkeeping export, bank connection, email pickup - stays at the desk. On the go it is about what comes up on the go: photographing a till receipt, taking an invoice out of a mail attachment, quickly looking up what something cost.

Your library, not a copy

The app opens the library you already have. If it sits in the “Receipts Space” folder in iCloud Drive - where the Mac puts new libraries - it is offered right at first launch. Otherwise you pick it once yourself, no matter whether you keep it as a single file or as a folder. From then on it leads the list under “Recently Opened”, ahead of whatever was found in iCloud. That list fills the screen and belongs to no library: if you keep several, the button above the sidebar brings it back up and you switch without detours.

If you do not have a library yet, you do not need a Mac for it: enter a name and a currency, done. The app suggests currency and tax rates based on your country, exactly as the Mac version does. The new library goes into the “Receipts Space” folder in iCloud Drive, where the Mac finds and opens it without detours.

Find whatever you are after

The sidebar is the one you know from the Mac: all documents, the unconfirmed ones, the unpaid ones, the starred ones, the ones without a file, the last import and the trash. Below that your journal by year, plus contacts, categories and tags, each in a group that folds away. Every year unfolds into months, quarters or calendar weeks, and documents without a date are collected under “No Date”. How the journal is divided, which date counts and when your fiscal year starts is set under Settings > Journal - for the whole library, so on the Mac as well. Every entry says how many documents lie in it.

The list leads with the most recent document, grouped by month, with a preview of the first page. Money coming in is green, money going out is red, and whether a document is starred, not yet confirmed or not yet paid is shown by the same marks as on the Mac. An invoice billed in another currency shows the converted amount, with the original below it.

Search is a single field for everything: title, file name, notes, reference, the contact’s name and the text recognized inside the document. Case and accents do not matter, so “Muller” finds “Müller” too.

Start searching in the sidebar and the app moves to “All Documents” and searches there - because which year, which contact or which category it was is exactly what one tends not to remember. Inside a view, search keeps to that view.

From outside the app, too. If you want it, your iPhone’s own search knows your documents as well: by title, sender, category, tags and the text inside the document. Tapping a hit opens that document in the app. Siri reads the same index and knows these are receipts: you can ask about what is written in them, and about two things a search does not answer - “show me my unpaid invoices” and “how much did I spend on fuel in September”. Both are in the Shortcuts app as well; sums stay per currency. Because this search index lives outside the library and is kept by the system, which means it is not encrypted, the app asks once per library - in Settings, where the index can also be built again. What it holds is what the app saw the last time you opened it.

Whatever you want to deal with in passing takes a swipe: to the right to confirm or star, to the left into the trash. In the trash, the same swipe puts a document back where it came from.

Document and details

On iPhone a document shows its details right away: type, amount, date, contact, category, tags, reference and notes. Above them is the top of the first page, so you can tell which document it is. Tap it, spread two fingers on it or pull it down to see the whole page, where the app also marks what it read in the document. On iPad, PDF and details sit side by side.

Everything can be changed right where it stands: amount and currency, document and payment date, contact, category, tags, title, reference, tax amounts and notes. No edit mode, no saving. Typing a contact, a category or a tag that does not exist yet creates it; so do “New Contact…”, “New Category…” and “New Tag…” in the picker and in the sidebar. A button next to each tax rate works it out of the gross amount. Enter a foreign currency and a second line appears below it with the amount in your library’s currency: the app fetches the rate of the day the document was issued - the same rate the Mac would have taken - and notes it, with its date, beside the field. If your bank settled at a different rate, just type the amount in yourself; the rate then follows from your figure. Without a connection the document stands in its own currency until then, and the app asks for the rate again the next time you open it.

Below the details float the next steps, each only while there is something to do: “Confirm” and “Payment”. Under “Payment” you set the payment date, the document date or today, or bring up the payment code for your banking app. Taking a confirmation back is at the very end of the details. The PDF and the original file it was made from - a photo, an email, an XRechnung - are listed at the end of the details; a tap opens them to look at, share or save to Files.

On iPhone, swipe sideways to get to the next or previous document, as in Photos. That way you can page through a whole month without going back to the list each time. With a keyboard attached, the arrow keys do the same.

If you want the document on its own, a tap on the eye button opens it in the view the Files app uses as well: page overview, search in text, printing. Plus notes, signatures or markup with your finger or the Pencil, which travel back into the library and show up on the Mac.

Audit-proof libraries

If your library is kept audit-proof, a confirmed document stays untouched: its details can be read but not changed, there is no trash for it, and the markup tools are not offered in the first place. The confirmation can only be taken back on purpose, with “Unlock Entry”, and that too goes into the document’s history. The app behaves exactly like the Mac version here.

Capturing documents

Photograph them. The camera finds the edges of the paper, straightens it and corrects the perspective. Several pages in a row become one PDF. The till receipt from your pocket lands in the library right away instead of waiting until you are back at your desk. When it has to be quick, the camera also starts from the Action button, a Shortcut or “Hey Siri, scan a receipt”.

Take in what is already there. PDFs from your Files or from iCloud, photos from your library, several at once as well. And anything someone sends you in another app: the invoice in a mail attachment, the document from a shop program, or an AirDrop from the Mac go straight to Receipts Space through “Share”. On iPad you simply drag a PDF from the neighboring window onto the list. Images become PDFs and are read right away, just like a scan.

And it is there on the Mac. New documents are written straight into the library, the way a second Mac would. Next time you open it, they are there: no inbox, no import step, no reconciling by hand.

Invoices in the body of an email

Many shops do not attach the invoice but write it right into the email. Apple’s Mail app cannot hand a message to other apps, but it can print it as a PDF - and that PDF can be shared:

1. Open the email in the Mail app.
2. Tap the reply arrow at the bottom. The menu with “Reply”, “Reply All” and “Forward” has “Print” at the very end.
3. In Print Options, tap the share icon at the top. Alternatively, spread the page preview with two fingers; the PDF then opens full size with a share icon of its own.
4. Pick “Receipts”.

The email goes into the library as a PDF, and date and amount are recognized from its text like with any other document.

Emails saved as a file (.eml) are taken in directly as well: from the Files app, by AirDrop from the Mac, or as the attachment of a forwarded message. If the email carries a PDF, the app takes that PDF. Otherwise it turns the text of the email into a PDF and uses the subject as the title.

Text and data recognition

Still on the device, the app reads the text of a scan and places it invisibly over the image. The document is searchable from the start, and its text can be selected and copied, here as on the Mac. In the settings you can pick the language or switch recognition off entirely.

From the text it read, the app also picks out what the document is about: the document date, the total, the tax it contains along with its rate, the currency and an IBAN if one is printed. Behind that sits the same recognition the Mac uses. It happens alongside: the document is in the library immediately, the details follow a moment later. Only empty fields are filled - whatever you entered yourself stays untouched.

Electronic invoices are read properly. If a PDF carries an electronic invoice, that is ZUGFeRD or Factur-X, the app takes the details from its data instead of reading them off the page: date, amount, tax per rate, currency and bank details are stated there bindingly. The document gets the tag your library uses for these, exactly as on the Mac - out of the box that is “e-invoice”. And if an invoice arrives as plain XML, as is common for XRechnung sent to public authorities, the app draws a readable PDF from it.

Reverse charge is recognized too. Where you owe the VAT on an invoice yourself, the app marks the document with the tag your library uses for it, exactly as the Mac does. Which tag that is, you pick on the Mac.

Paying a bill

Where a bill names a bank account, the app turns it into a payment code: the same one tradespeople and utilities print at the bottom of their invoices, and the one every common European banking app reads. Payee, account, amount and reference are all inside it, so there is no IBAN left to type.

Since a phone photographs itself badly, the code comes two ways. Save it to your photos and pick it in your banking app next to its QR scanner, where most apps accept an image instead of the camera. Or hold a second device over the screen and scan it there. It travels well, too: the picture is made to be sent to whoever is going to pay the bill.

The account number is verified first. An IBAN that was garbled while reading the bill fails that check and never makes it into the code. You find it in the bill’s details, where you can correct it or add it yourself.

History and dashboard

For every document, a tap on the clock symbol shows its history: when it was created, which detail changed when from which value to which, whether it was confirmed, starred or put into the trash, and from which device. That covers everything that happened on the Mac as well, because the history lives in the library itself. If you need it outside the app, for an audit say, you can export it as a file.

The dashboard is the same one as on the Mac. A tap on the chart symbol evaluates whatever the sidebar is currently showing: totals, shares by contact and category, tax per rate, tags. Pick a year, a contact or a tag in the sidebar and the dashboard covers precisely that; a year or a month is set beside the period before it. From a pie segment the way leads back to the document. What it shows can be printed or passed on as a PDF, and on iPad it takes up as much room as the screen allows.

On iPad

The sidebar on the left, the list next to it, then the document, and the details on the right. The space is there, so nothing has to be pushed aside to see something else. On iPhone the same thing as a sequence, from the sidebar through the list to the document, and back again with a swipe. Portrait and landscape.

Easy on data and battery

The first time you open a library, the app reads all of it and shows how far it has got; after that it remembers where it stopped and only fetches what is new. Large libraries are therefore right there from the second time on, and if the app is closed while it reads, it carries on from there the next time. Only what is needed is pulled from the cloud: the PDF exactly when you open the document. The list itself loads nothing, otherwise every scroll would take minutes on a bad day. What another device adds or changes shows up on its own while the app is open, and when you come back to the app it fetches what arrived in the meantime. You can still refresh whenever you like by pulling the list down.

Subscription and license

If you subscribe to Receipts Space on the App Store, you can use this app at no extra cost: the subscription covers Mac and iPhone alike, and it can be taken out here just as on the Mac. If you bought directly, you open your license file once or paste in your key.

Without an active subscription or license, a scan carries a small reference to our website, exactly as on the Mac.

What the app does not do

Receipts Space for iPhone and iPad is a companion app. If you expect the full range of the Mac version, these points are worth knowing:

• No reports and no exports. The dashboard evaluates what you are looking at. Reports, tax lists, bookkeeping export and sending things to your accountant remain a matter for the Mac version.
• No bank connection, no email pickup, no watched folders. Everything that collects documents automatically runs on the Mac.
• The app does not suggest a contact or category. You can assign both here, but working out who a new document belongs to is the Mac’s job. That is where the knowledge about your previous documents sits.
• Your bank makes the transfer, not the app. The app hands you the payment code; the payment itself is started in your banking app. Passing a prepared transfer over from another app is something banks do not allow, for good reason. Transfer templates and your own sending account stay on the Mac, and a document gets its reference number there when you confirm it.
• Deleting for good only on the Mac. A swipe puts a document into the trash, from which it can be recovered at any time. Removing it forever is too final for a swipe gesture.
• Text recognition for images only. Scans, photos and images are read on the device. A finished PDF enters the library as it is: if it contains text, the details are recognized from that as well. If it contains none because the PDF is just a photo, the Mac extracts it once the document arrives there.
• No encrypted libraries. A library protected with a password cannot be opened on the iPhone yet, and a new one with a password is created on the Mac.
• No syncing in the background. The app fetches what is new while it is open, not while it is closed or in the background. That goes for your iPhone’s search as well: a document the Mac added yesterday only turns up there once the app has been open.
• Sharing brings the app to the front. Receipts Space accepts a shared document by opening and showing it right away. Taking it in quietly in the background is not possible yet.
• English only for now. Other languages will follow.

Requirements

• iPhone or iPad running iOS or iPadOS 17 or newer
• A Receipts Space library reachable through iCloud Drive or the Files app
• For syncing with the Mac: a current version of Receipts Space

If you have any further questions, our support team will be happy to help.