How Expio turns a receipt photo into an expense
What actually happens between taking a photo of a receipt and seeing it in your budget: the reading step, the check you do, and how long each piece of data is kept.
Typing receipts into a spreadsheet is the reason most expense trackers get abandoned. Expio is built around the opposite idea: take a photo, check the result, move on. Here is what happens in between.
Step 1: reading the receipt
When you scan a receipt, Expio sends the image to our server, which asks Google's Gemini model to read it. Gemini returns the merchant, the date, the total, the tax and, when the receipt shows them, the individual line items. The same works for receipts saved as PDF files.
The model is good at this, but it is not perfect. Faded thermal paper, handwritten totals and receipts in two languages can all trip it up. That is why the next step exists.
Step 2: you check it
Before anything is saved, Expio shows you what it read. You can fix the amount, change the category, add a note, or mark the expense as business use. Nothing reaches your reports until you save it.
Expio supports 16 currencies, so a receipt from a trip abroad is recorded in the currency you actually paid.
Step 3: statements, without connecting your bank
Expio does not connect to your bank account. Instead, you can upload a statement your bank already gives you, as a PDF or a photo. Expio reads the transactions from it and lets you match them against your receipts.
Only the last four digits of an account number are kept. The raw list of imported transactions is deleted automatically 90 days after the import; the expenses you choose to keep stay until you delete them.
Where your receipts are stored
Unlike our other apps, Expio does keep your data on our server, because syncing receipts across devices and sharing them with an organisation is the point of the app. Receipt images are stored on our server and opened only through links that expire after an hour.
When you delete your account in Settings, Expio deletes your receipts, statements and budgets from the server. Daily backups that may still contain them are kept for up to 14 days.
Getting your data out
You can export your expenses at any time as an Excel spreadsheet or a PDF report, for your own records or for whoever does your taxes.
Expio organises expenses; it does not give tax advice. Tax categories in the app are suggestions to check with a qualified adviser.