The scanning was never the hard part. The hard part is knowing which of the extracted numbers you can trust.
There is a shoebox, or a drawer, or a photo album on your phone with four hundred pictures of receipts in it. Every year around tax time it becomes a weekend.
Plenty of apps promise to solve this by reading receipts automatically. Some are quite good. And the failure mode is consistent enough to name: they read a faded thermal receipt, get one digit wrong, and hand you a confident number that is wrong.
Wrong-and-confident is worse than nothing. Nothing makes you check. Confident makes you trust it.
What a receipt actually is
Half a receipt is clearly legible: the total, the date, the merchant. The other half depends on the receipt: a faded line item, a handwritten tip, a crumpled tax line, a merchant name abbreviated past recognition.
Any honest workflow has to treat those two halves differently.
Keep the original image, always
The extracted data is a convenience. The image is the evidence. If there is ever a question, you go back to the picture, so the picture never gets thrown away.
Extract what is visible
Date, merchant, total, tax, payment method. Only what is actually on the receipt. Nothing inferred, nothing filled in from what would be reasonable.
Flag what is uncertain
This is the step that separates a useful workflow from a dangerous one. When a digit is ambiguous, it gets marked as ambiguous rather than guessed.
Queue the uncertain ones for a human
You get a short list of "check these" instead of four hundred entries you have to spot-check at random. Ten minutes, not a weekend.
It is not a bookkeeper
Worth being direct: this prepares records. It does not categorize expenses correctly for your specific situation, know which meals are deductible, or replace your accountant.
What it does is hand your bookkeeper a clean, sourced, reviewed set of records instead of a shoebox. That is a real saving, in their hours and in your weekend, and it is a smaller claim than most software in this category makes.
When to bother
Volume is the deciding factor. Twenty receipts a year is a drawer, and a drawer is fine. Several hundred, arriving continuously, spanning multiple categories: that is where the compounding annoyance justifies the setup.
The other trigger is having been audited, or fearing it. Sourced records with preserved originals are a materially different position to be in than a shoebox.