Receipt is indeed a great tool for us to keep track of our expense systematically, however, almost all the receipts we get are a printed-paper or in scanned digital copy, which is not easy to file and track. Therefore, we need perform receipt ocr on these files, to make the receipt copyable, searchable and file into editable format for easy tracking.
To do receipt OCR, we need professional OCR tools, here we list 6 best receipt OCR tools, including high-quality receipt OCR software that work on a Mac or Windows PC and receipt OCR app that manage your receipt on Android or iPhone. For sure, there includes the free receipt ocr solutions.
There are plentiful OCR tools available on the market and it is not easy to pick up the best one. So, we tested and collected feedbacks from a lot of OCR users, finally Cisdem PDF Converter OCR is proved to be the best option, it is worth a try.
Cisdem PDF Converter OCR is a mac&windows program to convert and create PDF from other documents, also with its OCR feature, users are allowed to convert scanned PDFs and images, like your receipt, invoice, signed contract to various editable formats (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Text, etc.), so you can manage these files easily on your mac or windows.
What’s more, to deal with a bunch of receipt or scanned files in the same time, Cisdem support batch OCR, which is helpful to save your time on a receipt OCR task.
Cisdem PDF Converter OCR
Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7 
Free Download macOS 10.14 or later Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7 Free Download macOS 10.14 or later
You can drag and drop your PDF receipt or image receipt to the program.
If you just have paper receipts in hand, you can go to the end of this post to learn how to scan your receipt to digital copy on computer.
For PDF receipts, then choose file language, page range and select output as Excel, Text or other editable formats;
For Image receipts, choose file language, output and image settings as needed.
Then click “Convert” to start the receipt OCR progress on your mac or Windows.
If you want to do OCR on receipts online free without installing any 3rd party OCR software, you cannot miss out Google Docs and online2pdf, these 2 are my favorite solutions, they are free and able to get your OCR job done.
For users once searched online free solutions to manage and share documents, Google Docs won’t sound unfamiliar to them. Google Docs is one of the most online free platforms to manage and edit documents, offered by Google, also, it offers Google OCR feature for scanned PDF and images.
Online2pdf is an online PDF tool to convert, create, merge, split, protect, compress and unlock PDF for free. Its PDF converter support batch OCR PDF or image files, while allowing users to customize the output file to some extent. Though it has a limit on file size, file quantity and file language, it can basically meet users’ need to OCR several receipts.
Also, you can file and track your receipts on a mobile phone instead of spending time to work on a Mac or Windows PC. Still, the best receipt OCR app is listed as following respectively for Android users and iPhone users.
Text Scanner [OCR] from Peace is one of the most popular OCR app to copy text from images and scans. It processes the OCR fast and accurately, supporting more than 50 different languages, even working on handwriting notes. More importantly, Text Scanner provides practically useful ways to operate the recognized text, you can dial the extracted phone numbers, copy text to clipboard, email, Google Drive, Google Keep, share to other cloud-based service…
CamScanner is a highly recommended application to perform OCR on iOS device, it scores high in Mac Appstore and is under active development, with the latest version released on Feb 27th. This app offers a lost of features to manage your paper or scanned files, like scan directly with your camera, optimize scan quality, sign on files, annotate and add watermark to files, extract/share recognized text from images, even protect your files. Its premium version allows you to edit the OCR results and other advanced features to work on PDF/images efficiently.
For sure, most of the receipts are papers, when how to scan a receipt to computer? There are 3 ways:
Way #1
Take a picture of the paper receipt with your mobile phone camera, and save to your photo library, then import to OCR app for recognization.
Way #2
Take a picture of the paper receipt with your mac/windows camera, then sync the receipt images to your mobile phone via Dropbox or other transfer tools.
Way #3
Connect a scanner to your Mac or Windows PC, place the paper receipts in the scanner, then run the scanning program on your computer, start the scanning and save paper receipts as PDF or image format.
It is not difficult to perform receipt OCR, as long as you have found the right OCR software or applications to recognize text from your receipts on Mac, Windows, even mobile phone.
Carolyn has always been passionate about reading and writing, so she joined Cisdem as an editor as soon as she graduated from university. She focuses on writing how-to articles about PDF editing and conversion.
