How to use SnapClaim

⚡ The 30-second version

Buy something for work, take a photo of the receipt. Oscar — the AI that runs SnapClaim — reads it, works out which ATO deduction it belongs to, and tells you what you can claim in a sentence you'll actually understand. That's the whole loop. Do it as you go through the year and tax time turns into a five-minute export instead of a weekend with a shoebox.

Everything else in this guide is just the useful stuff around that: chasing supplier bills, sorting your work vehicle, checking a GST invoice is legit, and getting your numbers out at the end of the year.

🚀 Setting up

Sign up with your email and you're in — every new account starts on a 7-day Pro trial, so you can try the lot before deciding on a plan. When the trial ends you drop to the free plan and keep going; nothing you've scanned disappears.

Tell Oscar your occupation

Head to Settings → Occupation and pick what you do. A sparkie claims different things to a nurse, and Oscar leans on this to get your receipts right from day one. It's the single most useful thing you can set.

Set your income bracket

In Settings → Income bracket, choose your range. This is how Oscar estimates the actual tax you'll get back on each receipt — the difference between "I spent $200" and "that's about $65 back at tax time."

📸 Scanning a receipt

1. Tap the big Scan button in the middle of the bottom bar.
2. Take a photo of the receipt, or pick one from your camera roll. A PDF invoice works too.
3. Give Oscar a few seconds. He reads the merchant, date, total, GST and every line item.
4. Check what he came back with, and hit save.

Crumpled servo receipt, faded Bunnings dockets, a photo taken on the dashboard at a red light — Oscar's seen them all and does his best. Clearer photos give better reads, but you don't need to flatten it under a book.

💬 What Oscar tells you

For every receipt, Oscar gives you three things:

• The ATO category — the deduction label the ATO uses (D1 for your work car, D3 for tools and clothing, and so on). You don't need to memorise these; that's Oscar's job.
• What's claimable — the dollar figure, and if a receipt is a mix of work and personal, he pulls out just the work bit.
• "Oscar says" — a plain-English note on his reasoning. This is the bit people actually read.

You'll also see an estimated tax saving on the receipt, based on the income bracket you set. That's roughly what this purchase puts back in your pocket at tax time.

✏️ Fixing a category

Open any receipt and you can change the category, tweak the amount, split the work/personal portion, or edit the merchant and date. Oscar remembers your corrections (see the next section), so you're teaching him, not just fixing one docket.

Faded docket Oscar couldn't date? Set the date yourself so it files in the right financial year instead of the current one. Fixing a date or an amount is free and unlimited on every plan — only category corrections count toward the free plan's limit of 3 a month (paid plans are unlimited).

📧 Emailing receipts in

Every account gets its own private forwarding address — you'll find it in Settings, something like sc1a2b3c@snapclaim.com.au. Forward any emailed receipt or invoice to it and Oscar reads it and files it automatically, same as a photo. No app needed.

On the free trial, forwarding is paced the same as in-app scanning: past 20 scans, if you forward a big batch at once Oscar takes them one at a time and emails you if one needs re-sending in a minute. On a paid plan he takes them the moment they land.

🧠 Oscar's memory

Scan the same place a few times and Oscar builds a pattern. Next time that merchant shows up, he already knows how you treat it. Your Bunnings is work, your Woolies is personal — he stops second-guessing.

Pinning a merchant Pro

You can pin a merchant as Always Work or Always Personal. Once pinned, Oscar never questions it again.

Ask Oscar to review your memory

In Settings → Oscar's memory, tap Ask Oscar to review. He reads back everything he's learned for you, flags anything that looks miscategorised, and suggests merchants worth pinning. Nothing changes on its own — each suggestion has an Apply button so you stay in charge.

🗂️ Your receipts & search

The Receipts tab is your running list. Tap any one to see the detail, the photo, and Oscar's notes, or to edit it.

Search finds a receipt by merchant or date on any plan. On a paid plan, search goes deeper — line items, categories, amounts — so "that drill from March" actually turns up. Search always looks across every year, not just the one your dashboard is showing.

On a paid plan you can also sort the list — by date, amount or merchant — which is the quickest way to spot an accidental double-up before you export. Free stays on newest-first.

🛡️ Warranties

Flag any receipt as having a warranty and it lands in your Warranties view — a running list of everything still covered, with the proof-of-purchase attached. When the cordless drill carks it in fourteen months, you're not digging through a drawer. Like search, warranties span every year regardless of what the dashboard's showing.

🧾 Bills & the tax-invoice check

The ABN & GST check

When Oscar spots a supplier's ABN on an invoice, he checks it against the Australian Business Register: is it valid and active, and is the supplier registered for GST? If they're not registered, there's no GST for you to claim back — and SnapClaim tells you so, right on the receipt, before you claim something you can't. You can also type an ABN in yourself to check it.

Bills you still have to pay

When a document is a supplier invoice that's not yet paid — an invoice number, an amount due, a due date — Oscar tags it as a Bill and records when it's due. On the Receipts screen, tap the 🧾 Bills due chip to see every unpaid invoice, soonest first. Overdue shows red, due-this-week shows amber, and your dashboard shows a "Bills due" card with the total you owe and the next due date. Paid it? Open the bill and tap Mark as paid — it drops off the list.

🚚 Your work vehicle

The Vehicle tab is home to everything about your work car. There are two ways the ATO lets you claim one, and you can't use both on the same car in the same year:

• Cents per km — 88c a business kilometre, capped at 5,000km. Simple, no receipts needed, tops out around $4,400.
• Logbook — your business-use percentage of your actual running costs plus depreciation. No km cap, so for a decent vehicle doing real kays, it usually wins by thousands.

Add your vehicle

1. Open the Vehicle tab and tap Add your work vehicle.
2. Snap a photo of it. Oscar recognises the make and model, and reads the number plate off the shot — no typing.
3. Add what you paid and when (that drives the depreciation).
4. If you've kept a 12-week logbook, pop in your business-use %. That's what unlocks the logbook comparison.

Which method wins

At the top of the tab, one panel shows both methods side by side and tells you which is ahead — updating all year as you log trips and scan fuel, rego and servicing. Your running costs come straight from receipts you're already scanning, so there's nothing extra to enter. When the logbook's ahead by four grand, you'll know it in September, not from your accountant next autumn.

Logging trips

Lower down, log a trip with the purpose, distance and date, and it feeds the cents-per-km side. Round trip? Double the km.

✅ Tax readiness

On the Tax screen, the readiness summary tells you at a glance where you stand — how many receipts are in, anything low-confidence that's worth a look, and whether you're in good shape to lodge. It's the "am I actually ready?" gut-check before you export anything.

📊 Tax summary & exports

The Tax screen totals everything for the year: your deductions, the breakdown by ATO category, your GST, and your BAS quarters. From here you can pull it out however you or your accountant want it:

• A CSV of your totals, or a file ready for Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks or Reckon Free
• A myTax PDF that lines up with the ATO's own labels Lite & up
• A BAS report for your quarterly lodgement Lite & up
• An ATO Audit Pack — every receipt, organised, if the tax office ever asks Pro

The raw CSV is free on every plan, so your numbers are always yours to take. The polished, ATO-ready myTax and BAS PDFs are a paid feature.

🗓️ End of financial year

You lodge per financial year, so SnapClaim works that way too. At 1 July your dashboard rolls to the new year and starts fresh from zero. The year that just ended is sealed and filed in an archive — never deleted.

Need last year? Open the Tax screen and use the financial-year picker (it only appears once you've got more than one year). Pick any sealed year and the whole screen recomputes for it — totals, BAS quarters, every export. Your records stick around for the full five years the ATO wants, and then some.

🔍 Statement health check

Upload a bank statement PDF and Oscar scans the whole thing for work-related transactions you never captured a receipt for — the deductions quietly hiding in your account. It's review-only: nothing's added automatically, it just shows you what you might've missed. Pro includes one check a month, and your statement is read once and never stored.

🤖 Oscar's tax analysis

Oscar reads your whole year against the ATO's rules and gives you an audit-readiness review: red flags to tidy up, deductions you might be missing, and anything that looks off. It's the second opinion you'd normally pay for, minus the appointment.

💾 Backup & restore

In Settings → Backup & Restore you can download a backup file of your receipts, and restore from one later. It's good habit to grab a backup before you change plans. While you're signed in your receipts sync to the cloud, so a new phone picks up where the old one left off — and on paid plans your receipt photos are stored in the cloud too.

💳 Plans & the free trial

Every account opens with a 7-day Pro trial. After that:

• Free — 5 AI scans a month, plus the ABN check, Bills, tax readiness, the Vehicle tab, mileage, full editing and email-in. A genuinely useful free plan, not a locked demo.
• Lite — unlimited scans, deep search, BAS export and cloud receipt storage.
• Pro — everything in Lite, plus the desktop app, your receipt photos on every device, the full Oscar tax analysis, the statement health check and the ATO Audit Pack.

Manage or change your plan any time in Settings → Manage plan. No lock-in, cancel whenever.

🙋 Getting help

There's a Contact Support box in Settings — send a message and we get back to you by email. For common questions and troubleshooting, the Help & FAQ has you covered. And if you're weighing up whether SnapClaim's for you, the honest answer is on the blog.