Expensify, Dext, and Smart Receipts are good tools — for different jobs. Here's an honest look at where rct-keep fits, what only it does, and when you'd be better off with one of the others.
Pick by the job you need done, not the feature count.
A personal receipt archive that fills itself from your email.
For households, sole traders, and anyone who wants every receipt kept properly — for tax time, warranties, and peace of mind. $3/mo flat.
Corporate expense management.
Employee expense reports, approvals, reimbursements, and company cards. Strongest when an employer is paying you back. From US$5 per user/mo.
Bookkeeping data capture.
Built for accountants and their business clients, feeding clean data into Xero, QuickBooks, and Sage. From ~US$25/mo.
A free mobile scanner.
Open-source app for manually photographing receipts and generating PDF/CSV expense reports, with mileage tracking. Free, Plus at US$9.99/mo.
Everything below about rct-keep is shipped today — not a roadmap item.
| Feature | rct-keep | Expensify | Dext | Smart Receipts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Getting receipts in | ||||
| Scans your email inbox for receipts Gmail via read-only OAuth; Yahoo, iCloud, Fastmail and custom servers via IMAP | Built in — connect once, receipts arrive on their own | Needs third-party forwarding tools | Fetch pulls from supplier portals, not your inbox | |
| Imports years of past receipts on first connect Choose full history, the last 12 months, or new mail only — with an estimate before anything imports | From a chosen date, for connected suppliers only | |||
| Personal email forwarding address A unique address per account, so auto-forward filters just work | Includes a ready-made Gmail filter to download | Shared receipts@expensify.com — Gmail auto-forwarding is fiddly | Dedicated @dext.cc addresses | |
| Several inboxes feeding one receipt library Mix Gmail and IMAP connections — e.g. both partners in a household | Via multi-user plans | |||
| Photo & file upload PDF, PNG, JPG, HEIC | ||||
| Native mobile apps | Works in any mobile browser instead | |||
| Reading each receipt | ||||
| AI extraction of vendor, date, total, tax and currency | Claude-powered parsing of images, PDFs and emails | SmartScan | Better OCR on the paid plan | |
| Line items extracted, each with its own category | Included | Itemisation is largely manual | Line-item extraction is a paid add-on | Manual entry |
| Email receipts stay renderable for good Inline images are downloaded and stored before the retailer's CDN links expire | ||||
| Original kept exactly as submitted Untouched file plus the raw email — no re-encoding, no metadata stripped | Stores the scan, not raw emails | Photos only | ||
| Duplicate detection | Vendor + date + amount, with a review queue | Date + amount | ||
| Companion-receipt linking Two documents for one purchase — say a PayPal receipt and the merchant's tax invoice — kept and searchable, but counted once in totals | ||||
| Category suggestions that learn your corrections | Next receipt from the same vendor uses your choice | Via rules | Smart suggestions | Basic predictions |
| Finding & trusting your records | ||||
| Full-text search inside receipts Reaches OCR text, line items, notes, tags — even the sender's email address | Ranked results with highlighted matches | |||
| Field-level audit history Before/after values for every edit, written by a database trigger so it can't be bypassed | Report-level activity log | |||
| Tags on individual line items Label the cab fare inside a receipt, not just the receipt — totals roll up by tag | Tags apply to the whole expense | Receipt-level metadata | ||
| Processing transparency A live queue page showing exactly what's being worked on, retried, or waiting | ||||
| Tax time | ||||
| Australian tax-year summaries July–June out of the box, with deductible, GST and per-category totals | Custom date ranges | Custom date ranges | Custom report periods | |
| Work-from-home deduction estimator Running-cost apportionment plus a depreciating work-asset register, built from your own receipts (Australia) | ||||
| GST / tax captured per receipt | ||||
| CSV export you can hand to an accountant | Take everything with you, any time | PDF, CSV and ZIP reports | ||
| Xero / QuickBooks integrations | Not the job — export CSV instead | Core strength | ||
| Expense reports & reimbursement workflows | rct-keep is a personal archive, not expense software | Core strength | Expense claims | Report PDFs |
| Mileage tracking | Via expense claims | |||
| Price | ||||
| What it costs All plans compared at their entry price for one person | $3/mo or $30/yr — everything included, 14-day free trial | Free tier (~25 scans/mo), then US$5–9 per user/mo | From ~US$25/mo (5 users, 250 documents) | Free; Plus US$9.99/mo |
| No per-scan caps or per-user pricing | One flat price; fair-use processing pace | Scan caps on free, per-user on paid | Document allowances per plan | Free tier limits OCR |
Details for Expensify, Dext, and Smart Receipts are drawn from their public websites, documentation, and pricing pages as of July 2026, and may have changed since. All trademarks belong to their respective owners. Spotted something out of date? Email hello@rct-keep.com and we'll fix it.
Connect Gmail (read-only OAuth) or any IMAP inbox — Yahoo, iCloud, Fastmail, custom — and rct-keep finds receipts itself, including years of history. The others need you to forward every email or buy a separate tool to do this.
Retailers host receipt images on CDNs that go dark within 12–18 months. rct-keep downloads and stores every inline image the moment a receipt arrives, so it still renders perfectly years later.
A PayPal receipt and the merchant's tax invoice are the same purchase. Link them and both stay kept and searchable — but the total is only counted once. Duplicate detection alone can't do that.
For Australian users: apportion electricity, internet, and phone bills by your WFH schedule, and track depreciating work assets — immediate deduction under $300, prime-cost or diminishing-value above — straight from the receipts you already have.
Every field change is logged with before/after values by a database trigger — not application code — so the history can't be quietly bypassed. Line items are tracked the same way.
$3/month or $30/year for everything. No per-user pricing, no scan caps, no line-item add-ons, no ads, and your data is never sold. There's a CSV export so you can leave whenever you like.
rct-keep doesn't try to be everything. If any of these describes you, pick accordingly.
Expensify's approval workflows, reimbursements, and corporate cards are the whole point of the product. rct-keep has no expense reports and no approvers — by design.
Dext exists to feed clean transactions into Xero, QuickBooks, and Sage. rct-keep exports CSV, but it doesn't push into accounting software.
Smart Receipts is a genuinely good free, open-source app with mileage tracking. If manual photo capture on your phone is all you need, it costs nothing.
Connect it and see what rct-keep finds — 14 days free, cancel in one click.
Start free trial