Buying a round is where drink tracking usually falls apart. Four drinks arrive at once, you are mid-conversation, and logging them one at a time is the last thing you want to do.
The receipt scanner reads a bar or restaurant receipt afterwards and adds everything on it in one go. It is a Premium feature, and the reading happens on your device through Apple Vision. The photo is not uploaded anywhere.
A receipt is a record of a night that already happened, so the scanner lives where you add drinks after the fact: in Add a Past Session, and when you add drinks to a finished session in History. While a session is running, use the photo, menu and barcode scanners instead.
# Step 1. Open the scanner
Start from either place:
- A night you never logged: on the Home screen, tap Add a Past Session, set when it started and tap Continue. The Add Drink screen opens. (The full flow is in adding a past session.)
- A session you logged but missed drinks in: open the History tab, expand the session, and tap Add drink next to Drinks Logged.
On that Add Drink screen, tap the receipt icon in the top-right corner. The Scan Receipt sheet opens.
On the free tier the icon carries a small lock, and the sheet shows Receipt scanning is a Premium feature. You can still open it and read what it does; tapping Take Photo or Choose from Library offers Premium.
The first time you use the camera, iOS asks for permission. Choose Allow. If you declined earlier, tapping Take Photo offers Open Settings to fix it, and Choose from Library works without camera access.
# Step 2. Take the photo
Tap Take Photo and photograph the receipt, or Choose from Library if you already snapped it.
Flat, well lit, and square on works best. A crumpled receipt at an angle is where any text recognition struggles, and this is no exception.
While it works you will see Reading the receipt….
# Step 3. Review what it found
This is the important step, and it is deliberately not optional.
Everything the scan found appears with the count as the heading, for example 4 drinks found, and the hint Untick anything the scan got wrong underneath. Each row has a tick beside it.
Nothing is added until you confirm. Untick anything that is not a drink, or that it misread. Service charges, food and the tip are the usual culprits.
# Step 4. Check the currency, sizes and venue
AlcoLog reads the currency off the receipt where it can, and says what it settled on, for example Recording in GBP · tap to change. Tap it to pick another currency if the receipt was ambiguous. It records what you paid, in the currency you paid it in, with no exchange rates.
The line starting Drink sizes: says which measures it used: read from the receipt when the receipt gave it away, otherwise from your region.
If the receipt names the venue, it appears in a Venue field. Edit the name, or tap Clear to leave it off. To put the venue on your session map, tap Pin this venue on the map: a Find Venue search opens with the name already filled in, so you can pick the right branch and tap Use This Venue. The button then reads Venue pinned, tap to change. The pinned venue goes on these drinks only; it is not added to your saved Locations. Skip it and the venue name is still saved, it just cannot be shown on the Session Map.
The venue only appears when Tag drinks with location is on in Settings > Locations Manager.
# Step 5. Add them
Tap Add 3 Drinks, or whatever your ticked count is. They land as normal drinks, with ABV filled in from the catalog where the name matched and the price from the receipt. A receipt has one timestamp, so the drink times are spread across the session.
- In Add a Past Session, the drinks join the list you are building. Tap one to correct a size or a time before you save the session.
- On a History session, the drinks are added to it straight away. If some would stretch the session into a neighboring one, AlcoLog adds the ones that fit and tells you how many were left out, so you can add those by hand at a time inside the session.
# When it finds nothing
If the receipt is unreadable you get No drinks found, with Try Another Photo to have another go.
There is no penalty for giving up: the Add Drink form is still there and always works. The scanner is a shortcut, not the only route.
# What’s next
The photo, menu and barcode scanners do the same job for a single drink, live, while a session is running.
If you pinned the venue, your session map shows the night laid out geographically. And for the round you did not get a receipt for, adding a past session covers logging it by hand.