Expensa
Batch-upload receipts and let your own AI key extract, categorize, and total them into an accountant-ready report.
The problem it solves
At the end of every trip or month, someone ends up with a shoebox: a folder of receipt photos, a stack of PDFs in an inbox, a pocketful of crumpled paper. Turning that into an expense report means typing each vendor, date, and amount into a spreadsheet by hand, then sorting into categories and adding the totals. It's slow, error-prone, and the same every time. Black-box SaaS expense tools automate the typing, but they own your receipts, charge a per-user subscription forever, and expect you to trust a third party with your financial documents.
- Manual data entry for every single receipt
- A recurring per-user subscription just to digitize paper
- Your financial documents held on someone else's servers
What you get
Batch AI receipt extraction
Upload 5–50 receipt photos or PDFs at once and a vision-capable LLM reads vendor, date, amount, currency, tax, and payment method for each.
Editable auto-categorization
Every receipt is sorted into a category list you control in Settings — Meals, Travel, Lodging, Office Supplies, Fuel, Software, and more.
Strict multi-currency safety
Amounts in different currencies are never summed together; each currency keeps its own subtotal and grand total.
Accountant-ready exports
Export a clean RFC-4180 CSV and a print-friendly PDF summary with per-category and per-currency totals.
Choice of LLM provider (BYO key)
Switch between OpenAI, Anthropic, or a local Ollama model any time in Settings; your key never leaves your config.
Installable mobile app (PWA)
Add it to a phone or tablet home screen straight from the browser — a full-screen app served from your own server, with no app store involved. Business data is never cached offline, so what you see is always live.
Own It 2.0 — API, 2FA, backups, dark mode
Expensa 2.0 adds the 2.0 owner layer. Upgrade by replacing the files — the database migrates itself, and it is still the same one-time purchase.
- REST API with an OpenAPI spec and signed webhooks
- Two-factor sign-in (TOTP)
- Email notifications through your own SMTP
- CSV import with a mandatory dry run
- One-click backups
- Dark mode
Own It 3.0 — works for your AI, not just for you
The report export now renders a real PDF — per-currency totals, spend by category, every receipt line — instead of leaving the browser to save a web page. Duplicate receipts are flagged across all your reports on the same vendor, date and amount, which is where the real mistake hides. An MCP endpoint puts the same reports in reach of your AI under the same roles.
- Roles with email invitations and a last-admin guard
- Append-only audit trail across browser, API and agent
- Your logo and colours throughout
- Scheduled backups with a guided dry-run restore
- Optional single sign-on (OIDC)
Pricing — one-time, yours forever
- ✔ Full source included — PHP you can read and change
- ✔ No subscription. One payment, yours forever
- ✔ It never phones home
- ✔ Your data stays on your server
No reviews yet — so here is what we offer instead. Every competitor price on our comparison pages is source-linked and dated, and when a vendor’s price won’t load we say so rather than guess. See the sources for yourself →
Screenshots
Honest limitations
- Not accounting software — no ledgers, no tax filing, no accountant replacement
- No direct accounting-software integration (CSV/PDF export, then manual import)
- Single-tenant: one admin account per installation
- No OCR built in — relies entirely on the LLM's vision capability
- Scanned PDFs (images embedded in a PDF) may extract less accurately than native text-layer PDFs
- Extraction accuracy is not guaranteed for any specific receipt, currency, or jurisdiction
Two-minute web installer, PHP 8+ (tested on 8.3) with MySQL or SQLite, standard shared-hosting compatible.
Covered in these guides
Expense SaaS charges per member every month. The honest one-time-purchase alternative — batch AI receipt extraction with your own key — plus today's Expensify/Zoho prices, verified and dated.
Search self-hosted expense software and you get Firefly III, Actual Budget and ExpenseOwl — all personal finance tools. Businesses need claims, approvals and reimbursement. That is a different product, and the category barely acknowledges it.
Deputy's minimum is "USD $30/AUD $30/GBP £20". Those are not conversions. Four vendors, four different answers to where you live, plus the VAT line that makes the published price wrong for half the world.
Frequently asked questions
Is my API key safe?
Your key is stored in your database on your own server and is transmitted only in the outbound HTTPS request you trigger to your chosen LLM provider. It is never logged, echoed, or passed through any Expensa infrastructure.
Will this run on shared hosting?
Yes. Expensa requires PHP 8+ with pdo, curl, and fileinfo — extensions present on virtually all cPanel/Plesk hosts. Installation takes about two minutes through the web installer.
What does it cost to run?
Your LLM usage cost depends on your provider and model; at time of writing, GPT-4o-mini reads a typical receipt image for a fraction of a cent, but verify current pricing with your provider before estimating.
Can it handle receipts in different currencies?
Yes. Expensa keeps a separate total per currency and never adds USD and EUR (or any two currencies) into one misleading number.
What if OpenAI changes its pricing or API?
You can switch providers in Settings in under a minute. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Ollama are all supported, including running Ollama locally with no ongoing API cost.