Google Drive is my favorite Android mobile app for scanning receipts in 2022
Why do I keep all of my shopping receipts? Honestly, I do not know.🤷🏾♂️
Ironic quote of the day: What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don’t actually improve their lives. — Jeff Bezos
Living and working in a sprawling city like Houston, I have many convenient shopping options. Hyperlocal electronic stores such as Micro Center and Best Buy, fast-casual Thai and Vietnamese food spots, a cornucopia of Mexican and/or Korean food trucks🤤, tool shops like Home Depot and Lowes for the maker in me, and Aldi locations for the prices and no crowds. However, my significant benefit is the paper receipts!
Admittedly, I love many odd things like 3D printing and building shelves.🛠️ But when I bring them home, paper receipts have mysterious voices that whisper to the impulsive consumer child in me. A female voice saying things like -"Hey handsome, did you need to buy this since you already have some?" or " Psst, you have a couple of days left to return this since you have not opened it.", or "Mr. Smarty Pants, do you remember the last thing you bought from Walmart that did not look or work right at home?!". 🥰Since working from home has become my metaverse, I began to embrace my bizarre relationship with paper receipts in 2021.
♥️Me and paper receipts became intimate when coworkers at my day job with a software company that develops document scanning applications challenged me to design a stand for phones to use mobile apps to scan. We had no idea how instantly my enthusiasm for building and mobile apps would collide during a weekend of passionate "maker-love"!😍
After I built the stand prototype, I set out to research the available apps in the Play Store for my Pixel 6 (Android 12.0), Moto E4 (7.1.1), and an old Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 (4.4.2). To my surprise, I discovered over 250+ apps with OCR — optical character recognition for scanning documents! OCR helps a document to be found with a keyword search for matching the content patterns.
From my preliminary list of the top ten based on the number of downloads, I picked the Google Drive app as my primary app for scanning receipts in 2022 for one reason — Voice Commands! Google Assistant simplifies recurring tasks with custom routines. Now I can say, “Ok, Google. Scan” and the Google Drive app will open to scan and save a receipt in the folder!
I am still analyzing the rest of my list to compare features between apps as they all have the same goal and planning to release more details in a future story post. Still, each app has a unique set of available destinations and editing features for documents. So please excuse me as I get cozier with my receipts. ;-)
