On the Ceum mobile app you can start a new transaction from a photo of a receipt. Ceum reads the image on-device and pre-fills the create-transaction form for you. This is a mobile-only feature — it uses the phone's camera and on-device text recognition.
Capturing a receipt
From the Transactions screen, tap Scan receipt and choose where the image comes from:
- Take photo — opens a guided document scanner that edge-detects, deskews, and crops the receipt before reading it, which materially improves recognition over a plain snapshot.
- Choose from library — picks an existing photo from your gallery, then lets you crop and rotate it so only the receipt is read.
Ceum then runs on-device optical character recognition (OCR) over the image, and also looks for any machine-readable codes (such as a fiscal or payment QR code) printed on the receipt.
Cropping and rotating
A photo from your gallery wasn't taken through the document scanner, so Ceum asks you to frame it. Drag the corners of the crop box around the receipt, use Rotate to turn the image a quarter turn at a time if it was shot sideways, then tap Done to continue. Leaving the box as it is reads the whole photo. Cancel abandons the scan.
Large photos are scaled down before reading. This keeps the scan fast and reliable without losing the detail the text recognition needs.
What gets pre-filled
The scan produces a best-effort draft and opens the new-transaction form with these fields filled where they could be read:
- Amount — the total, as a positive number.
- Date — the transaction date.
- Description — a short label taken from the merchant or header line.
- Currency — the ISO currency code, when a symbol or code could be detected.
Every field is optional — a miss is fine. If a recognizable code is present, it takes precedence over the OCR text for amount, date, and currency, and pins the currency of a known fiscal scheme; product or irrelevant codes are ignored.
How the currency is chosen
Receipts often print an ambiguous symbol ($, ¥, kr…) that maps to several currencies. Ceum resolves it using location signals on the receipt itself first, and falls back to your own context — your country, base currency, and language — when the receipt carries no disambiguating clue. A decoded fiscal code, when present, overrides this and sets the currency directly.
Review before saving
The scan only pre-fills the form — nothing is saved automatically. You always review the draft and correct anything before saving, exactly as with a manually created transaction. When OCR couldn't read one of the core fields (amount, date, or description), Ceum shows a short notice naming what's missing so you know to fill it in.
If you cancel — at the source picker, at the crop step, by denying camera or photo permission, or because the image yields nothing readable — the scan simply does nothing and no form opens.