Expensify is very good at what it's for: getting employees reimbursed by employers. Trouble starts when you point it at personal receipt-keeping — a job it was never shaped for. If you've tried exactly that and bounced, this page is the explanation.
Pick by the job you need done, not the feature count.
A personal receipt archive that fills itself from your email.
No reports, no approvers, no workflow — receipts in, parsed, categorised, searchable, summarised per Australian tax year. $3/mo.
Corporate expense management.
SmartScan capture, expense reports, approval chains, reimbursements and company cards. Free tier around 25 scans/month, then US$5–9 per user per month.
Everything below about The Paper Keep is shipped today — not a roadmap item.
| Feature | The Paper Keep | Expensify |
|---|---|---|
| Getting receipts in | ||
| Scans your email inbox for receipts | Gmail read-only OAuth; Yahoo, iCloud, Fastmail, custom IMAP — with up to 12 months of history on connect | Forward each email to [email protected] |
| Personal forwarding address A unique address, so auto-forward filters just work | Per-account address plus a ready-made Gmail filter | Shared [email protected], matched via your login email |
| Native mobile apps | Any mobile browser | Capture-focused and polished |
| Unlimited scanning on the base price | $3/mo flat, fair-use pacing | Free tier caps scans; paid is per user |
| Personal-archive jobs | ||
| Built for keeping receipts long-term Originals untouched, email images archived before links rot | Stores the scan; built around report submission, not archival | |
| Household use — several people's receipts in one library | Multiple inboxes, one account, no per-user pricing | The unit is the employee on a company policy |
| Full-text search inside receipts | OCR text, line items, notes, tags | |
| Field-level audit history | Report-level activity log | |
| Tax time (Australia) | ||
| Australian tax-year summaries July–June, deductible and GST totals | Custom date-range reports | |
| Work-from-home deduction estimator | ||
| Expense reports, approvals, reimbursements | By design — there's no workflow to administer | The whole point of the product |
| Mileage tracking | ||
| Price | ||
| What it costs | $3/mo or $30/yr, everything included | Free (~25 scans/mo), then US$5–9 per user/mo depending on plan |
Details for Expensify are drawn from its public website, documentation, and pricing pages as of July 2026, and may have changed since. All trademarks belong to their respective owners. Spotted something out of date? Email [email protected] and we'll fix it.
The Paper Keep doesn't try to be everything. If any of these describes you, pick accordingly.
Submitting expense reports up an approval chain is Expensify's core competency. The Paper Keep has no concept of a report or an approver.
Corporate cards, policy rules, multi-level approvals — none of that belongs in a personal archive, and all of it is in Expensify.
Expensify does distance rates natively.
Personal receipts don't need a workflow — they need to be captured completely and found later. Every Expensify concept between those two points is friction.
Forwarding every order confirmation by hand is the step people quit at. A connected inbox removes the step.
Five-year durability, July–June summaries, GST totals and WFH methods are the actual requirements of an Australian return — not report PDFs.
This one isn't really a contest — it's a category error that a lot of people (reasonably) make. Expensify pointed at a household produces expense reports nobody will ever approve; The Paper Keep pointed at a company would leave the finance team with no controls at all. If your receipts end in a reimbursement, use Expensify. If they end in a tax return, a warranty claim, or a drawer you'd rather not maintain, that's the job The Paper Keep was built for.
Want the wider field? See the full comparison or our roundup of personal receipt apps.
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