Whether you want to keep track of your spending for personal or business reasons, it’s often a good idea to keep receipts. That way you can either tally up the totals or prove to your boss (or the IRS) that you actually purchased what you said you did.
I also tend to jot down a note on my phone using an expense tracker such as Hello Expense or an online finance service such as Mint. But that can be time consuming if you want to write down how much you spent, where you spent it, and how the expense should be categorized.
Lemon is a new service that aims to make expense tracking a little easier by letting you simply scan a receipt with your phone’s camera.
The company offers a free Android app, and BlackBerry, iOS, and Windows Phone apps are in the works. You can also snap a photo of a receipt and email it to your Lemon account if you don’t have a supported device. That feature also lets you forward any receipts that you receive via email.
Android users can fire up the app, take a picture of a receipt, add a category, and upload it to Lemon’s servers where the company will convert the image to text and file your expense. You can then use the app or the website to view all of your expenses.
Lemon doesn’t offer the kind of in-depth financial management tools that you get with a service like Mint. It doesn’t tie into your bank account to track your balances, for instance. But if you’re just looking for a simple way to keep track of your spending, it looks like a pretty neat service.
via The Next Web
