A receipt app for freelancers.

The two questions your records have to answer

At the end of a tax year, your records have to support the figures on your return: who you paid, when, how much, and what it was for. That is the obvious one, and almost any system limps through it.

The second question is the one that costs money. At the end of a project, you need to know what that client's work actually cost you — the stock photo licence, the train fare to the briefing, the domain you registered on their behalf, the software you bought for one job and cancelled after. That number decides whether your day rate was real. Nothing on any of those receipts records which client it was for.

Why "I'll sort it at the end of the quarter" fails

It fails for a boring reason: the information you need to sort by is only in your head, and it has a short shelf life. A £14 taxi is obvious on the Tuesday it happens and genuinely ambiguous eight weeks later. So the sorting session either does not happen, or it happens badly — and the costs that were hardest to attribute, which are usually the small frequent ones, get dropped.

Small and frequent is exactly where a freelancer's money goes. One forgotten £14 is nothing. Forty of them across a year is a week of work you did for free, and you will never see it, because the evidence of the loss is the thing you failed to keep.

Money you spent for a client is not money you spent

There are two distinct kinds of client cost and it is worth being strict about the difference. One you absorb: it comes out of your rate, and it belongs in your own expenses. The other you bill back: it is going onto an invoice, and until it is paid it is money of yours that someone else is holding.

If both sit in one undifferentiated pile, two things go wrong at once. Your profit looks worse than it is, because rebillable costs are dragging it down. And you forget to bill some of them, because the only list of what is owed to you is the pile itself. The fix is to mark a receipt as rebillable when you take the photo, while you still know it is, and to be able to pull just those out later.

The receipt in another currency

Freelancing crosses borders more than most self-employment does — an overseas client, a subscription billed in dollars, a conference in another country. The trap is not the conversion itself; it is converting at the wrong moment. If a tool re-converts historic costs at today's rate, last March's figures change every time you open them, and they stop agreeing with what you actually paid.

Convert once, at the rate that applied when the money left, and keep both numbers: the original and the converted one.

How Receiply does it

You photograph the receipt. The text is read on your device, and only that extracted text is sent to be interpreted into a merchant, date, total, category and every line item with quantities. The photo itself never leaves your phone, and there is no bank login — Receiply has no connection to your bank and never asks for one. That last point is not only a privacy position: a bank feed cannot see the cash you handed over at a market stall or a car park, and a freelancer's costs are full of exactly that.

Four things carry the weight for freelance work:

• Projects group receipts by client, job or trip. Tag at capture, and a project's costs stay together without a sorting session; the accountant pack breaks down by project.
• The reimbursable flag marks a whole receipt as something you will bill back, and exports carry a reimbursable-only switch — so the list of what you are owed is one export, not a memory test.
• Multi-currency keeps the amount you actually paid and freezes the converted figure at the moment you save it. Rates can be refreshed, or overridden by hand, but a later rate move cannot rewrite a cost you already recorded.
• The financial year setting has a 6 April preset alongside 1 January, 1 April and 1 July, so exported periods line up with the tax year you actually report on.

The Vault keeps it all searchable by merchant, category and date range, with filters for a time range, for income as well as expenses, and for entries that are missing a photo — that last one is how you find, in January, the receipt you meant to come back to in June. The free plan covers 10 scans a month with unlimited manual entries; Projects, reports and the accountant pack are part of Pro, which is $3.99 a month or $28.99 a year with a three-day free trial. What is stored and where is written in plain English on the privacy page.

What Receiply deliberately does not do: it does not file your return, calculate your tax or VAT, and does not decide what is allowable. It gets the evidence in order and keeps the client split intact; the judgement stays with you and your accountant.

If you are filing in the UK, the companion guide on keeping receipts for Self Assessment covers the dates and retention periods. If you also let property, there is one on keeping costs apart per property.

01

What should a freelancer look for in a receipt app?

Capture in seconds, the client recorded at the moment of capture, and a clean split between what you absorb and what you bill back. Anything that defers the sorting is deferring it forever.

02

Can I track expenses without connecting my bank account?

Yes. A feed proves money left an account but not what was bought or who it was for, and it cannot see cash at all. Receiply has no bank connection and never asks for one — it reads the receipt instead.

03

How do I handle a receipt in a foreign currency?

Convert once, at the rate that applied when you paid, and keep the original amount too. Receiply freezes the converted figure at save time, with a manual override if you need one.

04

Does Receiply do my tax return?

No. It organises receipts and expenses so the figures are ready and the evidence is attached. It does not file, calculate tax or VAT, or decide what is allowable.