When you need the full receipt, not just the total: itemized line items explained

Short answer: most of what a receipt is used for — search, spend totals, export to an accountant — only needs the merchant, date, category, and total. Line items matter for a narrower set of situations: splitting a bill, proving you bought a specific item, or seeing exactly what's driving a category total. Turn it on when one of those is actually your problem, not by default.

What the two levels of extraction actually capture

Every receipt you scan goes through the same base extraction — no setup, no AI, no network required — that reads the four fields most things in the app run on: merchant, date, category, total. That's enough for search, Stats, and export on its own.

Line items are a separate, optional layer on top — the individual products on the receipt, each with its own price. Turning it on doesn't change or replace the base extraction; it adds detail for receipts where you photograph the full body, not just the top and bottom.

Why line items need more than the base extraction

Reading "SM Supermarket, ₱1,842.50, March 3" off a receipt is a bounded, predictable problem. Reading every one of thirty line items — with abbreviated product names, varying formats, quantities, and per-unit prices — is not, which is why it needs an AI provider rather than the on-device pattern matching the base extraction uses. Two ways to run it:

• Apple Intelligence — on-device, iOS only, no account, no API key.
• Your own API key — Gemini or an OpenAI-compatible provider, either platform, using your own account and your own usage.

Both require a full photo of the receipt rather than just enough to read the merchant and total — the top-and-bottom crop that works fine for the base extraction won't have the line items in it.

When it's actually worth turning on

• Splitting a bill. "You had the pasta, I had the salad" is only settleable from the actual line items, not a shared total.
• Proving a specific purchase. A warranty claim or a return needs the receipt to show that exact item, not just that you spent money at that store that day.
• Seeing what's driving a category. "Groceries" as a monthly total doesn't tell you whether it's produce, snacks, or household supplies pushing it up — line items do, if you actually want that resolution.
• Business expense detail. A client or an accountant occasionally wants to know what was on a receipt, not just its total — a working lunch with three people's orders on one bill, for instance.

If none of those come up for you, the base extraction alone is a complete, free, unlimited system on its own — turning on line items is additive, not a prerequisite for the rest of the app.

What the receipt detail screen shows

The Line Items card on a receipt's detail screen always appears — it's never hidden — but shows one of a few things depending on your setup:

• The actual items, when the receipt has them.
• A locked card explaining line items as a Resiboo Plus feature, with a link to upgrade, if you haven't turned on AI extraction.
• A prompt to set up a provider in Settings, if you're on Plus but haven't configured Apple Intelligence or an API key yet.
• "No line items found for this receipt," if extraction ran but the receipt genuinely doesn't have any — a manually entered receipt, for instance.

So a receipt without line items never reads as broken — it's always clear which of those states you're in.

A practical habit if you turn it on

Line-item extraction is only as good as the photo. For receipts you actually want itemized — a grocery run you plan to split, a purchase you might need to prove later — get the whole body of the receipt in frame, not just a top-and-bottom crop. For everything else, the quick crop that captures merchant and total is still all you need; line items simply won't be there for those, which is fine.

Resiboo always reads merchant, date, category, and total for free, on every scan — line items are an optional Resiboo Plus layer on top, for the receipts where the total alone isn't the full story.