When you photograph a receipt with ricevuta.ai, something remarkable happens in the background. Within two to three seconds, the vendor name, total amount, date, VAT, and even a suggested category appear in your expense form — pre-filled and ready to confirm.
Here's how it works.
From pixels to data
Your phone camera captures an image — millions of pixels representing ink on paper (or text on a screen, for digital receipts). This image is sent to a vision AI model that has been trained to understand documents.
Unlike traditional OCR (Optical Character Recognition), which simply tries to identify letters and numbers, modern vision models understand context. They know that the large number at the bottom of a receipt is probably the total. They recognise "IVA" and "VAT" as tax indicators. They can distinguish the date format even when it's printed as "11/02/20" (is that February 11th or November 2nd? The AI checks other context clues on the receipt to figure it out).
What gets extracted
From a single receipt photo, the AI extracts: the vendor or business name, the total amount, the currency (detected from symbols like €, £, $), the date of the transaction, the VAT or tax amount (if visible), a brief description of the purchase, and a suggested expense category.
All of this is returned as structured data that pre-fills your expense form. You review it, make any corrections, and submit.
Accuracy and confidence
No AI is perfect 100% of the time. Crumpled receipts, faded thermal paper, unusual fonts, or handwritten additions can reduce accuracy. That's why ricevuta.ai always shows you the extracted data for review — you're never submitting blindly.
The AI also returns a confidence score. When it's less certain about the extraction, we show you a warning so you know to double-check.
Privacy by design
Your receipt image is sent to the AI model for processing, but it's processed in memory only and immediately discarded. The image is not stored, cached, or used to train any AI models. Only the extracted text data is returned and saved to your account.
The cost of intelligence
Modern AI receipt extraction costs a fraction of a cent per receipt. At scale, a company processing 200 receipts per month would spend less than 20 pence on AI extraction. The time saved — compared to manual data entry — is measured in hours.