Venmo Adds Receipt Scanning to Let Groups Split Bills Item by Item, With Tax and Tip Auto-Calculated
Venmo Adds Receipt Scanning to Let Groups Split Bills Item by Item, With Tax and Tip Auto-Calculated #
Venmo began rolling out a receipt-scanning feature on 9 November that allows users to divide shared expenses based on what each person actually ordered, rather than splitting totals evenly. The PayPal-owned payments app has long lacked this capability despite its dominance in peer-to-peer transfers.
The feature, announced via PayPal’s corporate newsroom, works by letting users snap a photo of a receipt or upload an existing image directly within the Venmo app. The platform then automatically identifies and itemises every line on the bill, and the person who paid can assign individual items to friends in their group. Once assignments are made, Venmo calculates each participant’s proportional share of tax and tip before sending payment requests, all without leaving the app.
Alexis Sowa, Venmo’s general manager, framed the update as a direct response to longstanding user friction. “Splitting the bill is one of the most common things people do on Venmo, but it can also be one of the most tedious,” Sowa said, according to Fast Company. The new tool is intended to cover a range of shared-spend scenarios beyond restaurants, including grocery runs between roommates or purchases made during group travel.
The launch follows Venmo’s introduction of Groups in 2023, which addressed longer-horizon shared costs such as rent, subscriptions, and holiday spending. Receipt scanning fills a narrower but high-frequency gap: the moment-of-settlement calculation at the end of a shared meal or outing.
Venmo appears to have timed the rollout in part as a competitive response. Apple incorporated a similar capability into iOS 27 earlier this year, allowing iPhone users to scan receipts via Visual Intelligence and settle shares through Apple Cash. Cash App and Zelle also compete actively in the peer-to-peer space.
A survey commissioned by Venmo found that around 40% of adults aged 18 to 22 typically cover the whole bill themselves and then chase down contributions from friends, while 20% already split by individual item and 15% divide the total evenly. The new feature is designed to make item-level splitting the simpler option, removing the manual arithmetic that has historically made it unpopular.
The receipt-scanning feature is currently available to a subset of users, with broader availability expected over the coming weeks.
Copy link