Can ReceiptIQ AI scan receipts in different currencies?

September 30, 2026 · ReceiptIQ AI · Xinzhou Liu

Short answer: Yes. ReceiptIQ AI reads the currency printed on the receipt, converts it to your home currency at the exchange rate of the day it is scanned, and keeps the printed amount and the rate on the receipt. There are 23 home currencies to choose from, and when a receipt prints no currency and something suggests it is foreign, the app asks once.

How the currency is found

The currency comes from what is printed on the receipt: a symbol, an ISO code, a currency word, the script, or national identifiers such as a tax-authority name or a business tax number. It does not come from where your phone is. A receipt printed in yen is read as yen whether you scan it in Tokyo or at home.

• One stray token does not decide. A Japanese receipt whose terminal ID ended in "1CAD" was once read as Canadian dollars. The rule now: a code counts only when it is not glued to other letters or digits, and accumulated evidence beats a single character.
• An exchange-rate table is not the receipt's currency. If three or more different currency codes are printed (a duty-free shop's courtesy table of rates, for example), the code scan says nothing.
• A bare "$" is the home currency unless the receipt's own evidence clearly points to a dollar country. The app scores US, Canadian, Australian, Singapore, New Zealand and Mexican evidence (state and ZIP, GST numbers, postal codes, national chains and similar) and only acts on a clear winner, because a wrong conversion puts wrong money into budgets.

Conversion and storage

• A foreign receipt is converted to your home currency at the exchange rate of the day it is scanned and stored converted, with the printed amount, the rate and the rate's date kept alongside. Budgets and charts sum the converted amount.
• The detail view always shows both amounts and the rate. Each item's printed price is shown under its converted price; where several printed units round to the same home cent (yen or won into Canadian dollars) it is shown with "≈".
• Settings has a switch, "Show foreign receipts in home currency", that only chooses which amount the lists show.
• Offline: the receipt is saved with its currency and converted the next time the app is opened with a connection.
• If the printed items differ from the printed total by more than rounding, that difference is kept, not hidden, so a receipt that does not add up on paper is still announced as not adding up.
• Change your home currency and the foreign receipts are re-converted: each is taken back to its printed amounts and converted again at today's rate. A receipt stored with no currency is left alone. Item prices can move by one unit in the round trip; the total is exact.
• Exports carry the currency columns (Currency, Original Amount, Exchange Rate; Printed Currency, Printed Amount, Exchange Rate in the items CSV). See Can I export my receipt data?

The 23 home currencies

You can pick any of these as your home currency: USD, CAD, AUD, NZD, GBP, EUR, JPY, HKD, TWD, MOP, SAR, TRY, SGD, MYR, PHP, PLN, BRL, SEK, DKK, NOK, CHF, CZK and KRW. The currency a receipt is printed in can be a wider set: for example Argentine pesos and Colombian pesos are not home currencies, but are detected and converted.

When the receipt prints no currency: it asks once

About a third of the receipts we have print no identifiable currency, and almost all of those are in the home currency, so the app does not ask about every one. It saves the receipt first, then asks "Which currency is this receipt in?" only when there is a reason to doubt the home currency:

• the receipt points to a foreign country (a foreign script, phone prefix or place name we are sure about), or
• the phone's time zone is in a country whose currency is not your home currency, or
• there is nothing printed and the total is a whole number at or above a threshold for the home currency (5,000 for dollars, euro and pounds) with whole-number items.

The buttons offer the suggested currency, your home currency, or "Other…". The answer is remembered per store. A guess is never applied on its own: Korean duty-free shops are in Korea and charge US dollars.

Cases from our own testing

Korean duty free: US dollars, not won

A receipt from an Incheon airport duty-free shop priced "$21.64" times ten, "Total amount $2,092.30". It was first stored in the home currency (Canadian dollars), about 38 % off. The fix is not "it says Incheon, so it is won", which would have been wrong by a factor of 1,400: Korean duty-free retailers price in US dollars, and the app now reads them that way. A second duty-free receipt printed a table of rates (JPY, KRW, CNY, EUR); the code scan took the first code in it and stored US$1,760 as 1,760 yen. The rate-table rule above came from that.

Colombian pesos: "$ 46,435" is forty-six thousand pesos

A Medellín café receipt prints a plain "$", no cents and a comma for thousands. It came back as 46.43 with a "does not add up" alert, because no rule treated "$ 46,435" as an amount. Four things were fixed together: the peso style of writing, an included consumption tax (INC) that had been listed as an extra item, the currency (Colombian tax-authority names score for COP), and the receipt's date.

Argentine pesos: the dollar-equivalent line

Two Buenos Aires restaurant pre-bills were saved as Canadian dollars (14,250 and 96,600). Argentine evidence (CUIT, AFIP, "no valido como factura", and similar) now points to ARS, and a "Total u$s" line, which is the dollar equivalent printed under the real total, is no longer taken for the total when the peso total is also printed.

Mainland China: no currency printed at all

A clothing-store receipt in Nanchang read "2100.00" and nothing else. The evidence is the writing: eight or more characters that exist only in Simplified Chinese (not in Traditional Chinese, not in Japanese) now mean yuan, unless a clearer dollar-country signal such as Singapore or Malaysia wins.

More cases, including Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, are on Scanning receipts abroad and Receipts Around the World.

Limits

• A receipt with no evidence is left in the home currency, or the app asks. Wrong guesses are possible; change the currency any time in the edit screen ("Receipt Currency").
• The rate is the one for the day the receipt is scanned (not the date printed on it); it comes from a public rate table and is stored on the receipt so you can check it.

Price: the first 30 receipts are free; Premium is $1.99 per month or $14.99 per year in the US. iPhone only.

Frequently asked questions

Can ReceiptIQ AI scan receipts in different currencies?

Yes. It reads the currency printed on the receipt, converts the amounts to your home currency at the exchange rate of the day it is scanned, and keeps the printed amount and the rate on the receipt. When the receipt prints no currency and there is a reason to doubt the home currency, it asks once which currency it is in.

Which home currencies can I choose?

23: USD, CAD, AUD, NZD, GBP, EUR, JPY, HKD, TWD, MOP, SAR, TRY, SGD, MYR, PHP, PLN, BRL, SEK, DKK, NOK, CHF, CZK and KRW. Receipts can be printed in a wider set of currencies.

Does it still work if I am offline when I scan a foreign receipt?

The receipt is saved with its currency and converted the next time the app is opened with a connection.

What happens to the original amount after conversion?

The receipt is stored converted, with the printed amount, the exchange rate and its date kept alongside. The detail view shows both, and the CSV export has Currency, Original Amount and Exchange Rate columns.

Does it handle Korean duty-free receipts and pesos?

Korean duty-free receipts are read as US dollars, since those shops charge in dollars. Colombian pesos printed as "$ 46,435" and Argentine pesos are recognised from their local evidence and converted.

More answers

• Scanning receipts abroad
• Receipts Around the World
• Five wrong-currency bugs, one cause
• Can I export my receipt data?
• Does ReceiptIQ AI work with Japanese receipts?