Total, sales tax and tip
Three separate numbers, because a US restaurant receipt prints three. An Add Tax button covers a slip with both a state rate and a local rate, and the tip is read as its own line instead of being swallowed by the total.
iPhone. Not on the App Store yet.
A receipt scanner built for tax season, not for tidy folders
Most scanners in the App Store turn paper into a picture and stop there. This one pulls five fields off the slip, hands them to you to check, and files the expense under a Schedule C category with the real line number printed under it.
79.99 a year or 12.99 a week. No free trial. The price sits on the home page above the fold, before anyone asks you for an email address, which is the opposite of how this category usually works.
What comes out
The photograph is not the product. The five fields are.
A scan that ends in a PDF has moved the paper, it has not done the work. In April somebody still opens every image and retypes the numbers. So a scan ends somewhere else here: in five values you can correct in three seconds, and a category that matches the form you file.
Date and merchant
The date decides which quarter an expense belongs to, so it is a field and not metadata. Fix a merchant name by hand and the app finds the logo in a dictionary of 200 common US stores that ships inside the app, with no network call.
A category with its line number
Not Groceries, not Personal. Office expense line 18, Supplies line 22, Travel line 24a, Meals line 24b, taken from the Instructions for Schedule C.
A confirmation screen you read
Every field editable, sitting beside the photograph it came from. If the total cannot be found the box is left empty and focused rather than filled with a guess, and nothing is written until you tap save.
The eight categories are the ones a sole proprietor reaches for most, and each one carries the line it lands on:
- Advertising, line 8
- Car and truck expenses, line 9
- Contract labor, line 11
- Office expense, line 18
- Supplies, line 22
- Travel, line 24a
- Meals, line 24b
- Utilities, line 25
Those numbers come straight out of the Instructions for Schedule C, and they are why the export is short work. A row that already says line 24b goes onto line 24b, with no translating from an app's private vocabulary into the form's.
The IRS asks you to keep the document that supports what you claim, so the photograph stays attached to its row and rides along inside the PDF export. See what kind of records should I keep. DeductHound records and totals what you enter. Whether an expense belongs on your return is a question for a tax professional.
On device
It reads the paper with the phone in airplane mode
Text recognition runs on your iPhone through Apple's Vision framework. That is not a policy you are asked to trust, it is a behavior you can test at the counter with one bar of signal.
No upload, no recognition server
The image and the text read from it stay on the phone. There is no recognition service in the loop, so there is nothing to send and nothing to leak on the way.
The category leader stops without a connection
Its recognition happens on a server, so a basement, a plane or a bad afternoon on a job site means no scan. There is a one-star review that documents it.
No bank login, ever
No Plaid connection, no transaction import, no reconciliation. Your banking credentials are never requested, because nothing here has a use for them.
No account and no email gate
No sign-up before you see the price. Data lives in SwiftData on the phone and syncs to your own private iCloud.
On-device text recognitionWorks in airplane modeNo GPS. No battery drain.No bank connectioniPhone, iOS 17 or later
Work out what a tracked quarter is actually worth
The self-employment tax rate is 15.3% and it sits on top of income tax, so an expense you failed to record costs more than the number on the slip. The free calculator does the 2026 arithmetic in your browser, with no account and nothing sent anywhere.
The difference
A document scanner against a scanner made for taxes
Both take a clean picture of a crumpled slip. Only one of them saves you the April afternoon, and the gap has nothing to do with the camera.
| The moment | A generic document scanner | A scanner built for taxes |
|---|---|---|
| What you end up holding | An image in a folder you named yourself. | Five typed fields: total, date, merchant, sales tax, tip. |
| How it gets filed | A folder called Receipts 2026, if you made one. | A Schedule C category with its line number, such as Supplies line 22. |
| When the reading is wrong | You find out in April, squinting at the picture. | You find out now, on an editable screen beside the photo. |
| With no signal | If the reading happens on a server, no signal means no scan. | Reads the slip in airplane mode, because Vision runs on the phone. |
| What it wants first | An account, an email address, sometimes a bank connection. | Nothing. No sign-up, no password, no banking credentials. |
| The backlog in your camera roll | One photo at a time, by hand. | Multiselect, one pass, then a confirmation queue. |
| What you hand over in April | A pile of images somebody has to retype. | A CSV and a PDF by quarter or range, every row carrying its line. |
That last row is the whole argument. A scanner that only makes images has quietly handed the data entry back to you, or to whoever you pay by the hour. When the five fields are already typed, dated and categorized, the quarter closes in the time it takes to pick a date range.
Over a year that is the difference between a habit and a pile. The long version is the expense tracker for the self-employed, and the version that ends at the form is Schedule C expenses.
Between scans
What happens after the confirmation screen
Scanning one receipt is easy in any app. Scanning the fifty-first one in November is the part that decides whether the year was tracked or not.
The shoebox goes in at once
Batch import takes the receipts already sitting in your camera roll, processes the selection in one pass and lines the results up in a confirmation queue. Of the thirty apps in this niche with a hundred ratings or more, two promise anything like it.
A nudge, not a notification storm
One weekly reminder to clear the pile, plus reminders on the payment dates themselves: April 15, 2026, June 15, 2026, September 15, 2026 and January 15, 2027. Home screen and lock screen widgets keep the month total and the next date in view, which nothing else here offers. If those four dates are what worries you, quarterly taxes on 1099 income walks through them.
The export is the point of the year
CSV for a spreadsheet, PDF with the images grouped by category, by quarter, by year or by any range you pick, both carrying the Schedule C line number. That is what a tax write-off tracker is for: not a nicer folder, a document that lines up with the form.
Missing paper is a different problem, and a common one. If a slip is already gone, an IRS audit with no receipts covers what the records rules require and what a reconstruction looks like.
Questions
The five things people ask first
Does the scanner work with no internet connection?
Yes. Text recognition runs on the iPhone itself through Apple's Vision framework, so a scan works in airplane mode, in a basement, or on a job site with one bar. The receipt image is not uploaded anywhere.
The leading app in this category reads on a server, which is why it stops when the signal does. There is a one-star review that documents it.
What exactly does it pull off the receipt?
Five fields: total, date, merchant, sales tax and tip. Tip gets its own field because a US restaurant receipt prints it on its own line, and an Add Tax button handles a slip carrying both a state rate and a local rate.
The expense is then filed under a Schedule C category that shows its real line number, such as Supplies line 22 or Meals line 24b, from the Instructions for Schedule C.
What happens when the total is unreadable?
The field is left empty and focused, with the keyboard waiting. It is never filled with a guess, because a wrong number you did not notice is worse than a blank one you did.
Every scan ends on the same confirmation screen: five fields beside the photograph, all editable before anything is saved.
Do I need to connect a bank account or create a login?
No to both. There is no Plaid connection, no transaction import and no reconciliation, so your banking credentials are never requested. There is no sign-up, no password and no email address to hand over before you see the price. Your data lives on the phone and syncs to your own private iCloud.
Can I use it today, and what does it cost?
Not yet. DeductHound is not on the App Store, so today there are two useful things on this site: the waitlist below, and the free self-employment tax calculator.
When it ships the price is 79.99 a year, shown as 1.53 a week, or 12.99 a week. There is no free trial, no countdown to forget about, and restore purchases stays visible.
One email, the day the scanner opens
No newsletter, no drip sequence, no discount codes. A single message when DeductHound is on the App Store, and then nothing else.
DeductHound is not tax advice. It scans, records and totals the expenses you enter. What is deductible for your business, which Schedule C line it belongs on and what you owe are questions for a tax professional. See the Terms of Use.
Sources
Every figure on this page, and where it came from
- The Schedule C line numbers shown under each category (line 8, 9, 11, 18, 22, 24a, 24b and 25). Instructions for Schedule C (Form 1040), IRS
- The requirement to keep the document that supports an expense you claim. What kind of records should I keep, IRS
- The 15.3% self-employment tax rate (12.4% social security plus 2.9% Medicare). Self-employment tax (social security and Medicare taxes), IRS
- The 2026 estimated tax payment dates: April 15, June 15, September 15 and January 15, 2027. Form 1040-ES (2026), IRS, catalog 11340T
- General background on estimated taxes for the self-employed. Estimated taxes, IRS
- What Schedule C is and who files one. About Schedule C (Form 1040), IRS