You snap a photo of a lunch receipt because you'll need it for expenses later. Or you receive a scanned receipt via email. The information you need — vendor name, date, itemized totals, tax amounts — is all there in the image, but when it's time to fill out the expense report, you're squinting at a photo and manually typing every line. One transposed digit in the total and your report gets flagged.
Why Receipt Photos Are So Hard to Work With
Receipts are among the worst candidates for manual transcription. They use small fonts, inconsistent spacing, and abbreviations. Thermal paper fades quickly, making older receipts even harder to read. And every expense system wants structured data — vendor, date, amount — not a JPEG attachment.
macOS has no built-in tool that extracts text from a receipt photo and puts it on your clipboard. Preview shows you the image. Photos organizes it. Neither of them lets you select the printed text and copy it. Third-party expense scanners exist, but they're heavyweight apps designed for enterprise workflows, not for quickly grabbing a total from a photo.
Drag Over the Receipt, Get the Text
Optic reads text directly from your screen. Open the receipt photo in any viewer — Preview, Quick Look, a browser, even your email client — activate Optic from the menu bar, and drag a selection over the portion of the receipt you need. The recognized characters land on your clipboard, ready to paste into a spreadsheet or expense form.
Expense Reports
Select the vendor name and total from a receipt image and paste them directly into your expense tracking tool. No retyping, no transposition errors. Grab individual line items or the entire receipt — each capture is saved in your menu bar history for reference.
Tax and Bookkeeping
Freelancers and small business owners accumulate receipt photos throughout the year. When tax season arrives, open each receipt image and extract the relevant figures with a single drag. Build your deduction spreadsheet in minutes instead of hours of manual entry.
Reimbursement Requests
Need to include exact amounts in a reimbursement email? Extract the total, tax, and date from the receipt photo and paste them into your message. The precise figures from the receipt carry more weight than approximate numbers typed from memory.