A wise housewife once proclaimed the power of “Receipts, proof, timelines, screenshots.” You’ll know this if you’ve ever been the person who put down their card to end an awkward standoff at the end of an expensive meal, and then fretted about whether you’d be paid back.
But the days of stressing over covering group expenses are about to get a little easier: Venmo just added receipt scanning to its app.
The feature, which is rolling out to Venmo users this week, lets you snap or upload a picture of your receipt and itemizes it for you. Venmo then calculates how much proportionate tax and tip everyone owes (which I, as a math-averse person, have always found to be the most tedious part) before sending out the requests.
The function helps make Venmo a one-stop shop for bill splitting and repayment — and especially handy for Gen Z, the group that’s least likely to carry cash and who struggles with murky repayment etiquette.
Gen Zers don’t even agree on how much each person owes when they share meals: Venmo’s own survey of 5,000 18- to 22-year-olds in the US found that 20% prefer to have everyone pay exactly what they ordered, 15% would rather divide evenly, and 12% take turns or have different people cover different costs.
By allowing users to split by item on the receipt, Venmo is making it easier to share costs — but I wanted to find out exactly how much easier. So I tested the new function with two of my colleagues (Disclaimer: Neither of them is Gen Z) on Monday to see how it stacks up against two other popular receipt-scanning apps, Tab and Splitwise.
Here’s how it went.
(Robot) Literacy isn’t dead
In the Pay/Request tab of my app, I selected the “Scan Receipt” function and uploaded a picture of the bill from Monday’s lunch at Blue Park Kitchen, a fast-casual joint we frequent in downtown New York City.
Dan, Grace, and I each got bowls with veggies, grains, and varying degrees of protein.
Venmo’s function accurately transcribed the totals from the picture.
Tab, the receipt-scanning app I’ve used for years, sometimes misreads the date or check number as the amount paid, resulting in an inaccurate balance. That reading error didn’t happen in Venmo’s new function.
I reached out to Tab for comment, but didn’t hear back.
Extra protein, please
After uploading the receipt and confirming the totals, I selected Dan and Grace as the people I wanted to request money from. Then, I assigned who ordered what.
Grace and I each ordered a seasonal specialty bowl, while Dan opted to DIY his, adding extra protein. Because of that, Dan’s subtotal was a little higher than mine and Grace’s.
Venmo then calculated the proportionate tax and tip we each owed. Once I reviewed and confirmed these totals, I hit “send” to request repayment.
Getting a second opinion
To check Venmo’s math, I went ahead and loaded the same receipt into Splitwise, a popular bill-splitting calculator. That app turned out the exact same totals as Venmo’s did — but without the ease of settling up within the same app.
That’s the biggest value-add that Venmo’s function brings: It lets you outsource the math, send requests, and, hopefully, get repaid faster, without ever leaving the app.
Adding a receipt-scanning function probably won’t solve Gen Z’s confusion about etiquette, but it might reduce some of the friction around it. I’d rather have a neutral, third-party app like Venmo tell me what I owe in tax and tip than a friend who might be overcharging me.
And though the function could cut down arguments over what everyone owes, it doesn’t guarantee that your friends will respond to — or even see — your requests any faster.
Although Grace repaid me as soon as I sent the request, I didn’t get my money back from Dan (who was presumably #lockedin writing Business Insider’s newsletter) until I verbally asked him if he’d seen it.
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