Why is a restaurant receipt harder to read than an invoice?
Because in the one head-to-head test we have, receipts came last. A 2025 benchmark by Berghaus and colleagues ran eight multimodal models from three families—Gemini 2.5, GPT‑5, and open-source Gemma 3 variants—over three document types. Prompts were tailored to each dataset, but the same prompt templates were used across every model within a processing strategy, so the models are comparable to each other. Receipts finished behind both invoice types for seven of the eight models tested.
Clean digital invoices96.50%Synthetic, structured, generated as data
Scanned invoices92.71%Stamps, handwriting, variable print quality
Scanned receipts87.46%Differing layouts, print quality, and image conditions like skew and lighting
Each figure is the best score any tested model reached on that document type — and each dataset is scored on its own field set, so read the table as three difficulty readings on the same models rather than one ranked exam. The benchmark’s authors describe their receipt set as “exhibiting a wide range of real-world variations including differing layouts, print quality, and image conditions (e.g., skew, lighting)” — which is a fair description of the piece of paper sitting under a water glass at the end of dinner.
The forty-point gap: reading the image vs. reading a transcript
The same study found something sharper. Each model was run two ways: looking directly at the receipt image, or reading a text version produced by a document converter first. On scanned receipts, native image processing hit 87.46%. The converter-first pipeline topped out at 47.00%.
Converting the receipt image to text before a model reads it cost roughly forty points of accuracy — and that penalty is measured on the header and total fields alone, the only fields this benchmark scores. Notably, the converter was not crude: the paper describes Docling’s output as maintaining “tables, sections, and other layout elements through markdown syntax,” while native processing “preserves all visual information and spatial context.” If even a structure-preserving conversion costs that much on a receipt’s header and total, an item table — where every price has to stay bound to the right name across a whole column — is at least as exposed. The benchmark does not measure that case, so treat it as the direction the evidence points, not as a measured result.
The researchers noted the same bottleneck: on their clean-invoice set, converter-first results clustered in a narrow 84–85% band across models, “effectively neutralizing the advanced capabilities of the larger, more powerful models.” On those runs, the pipeline, not the intelligence, looked like the ceiling.
This is why “does it scan receipts?” is the wrong question. In this benchmark, the same models landed forty points apart on the same receipts depending on whether they read the image itself or a text conversion of it. What a given app’s scanner reads is an implementation choice you cannot see from the outside.
Source: Berghaus et al., “Multi-Modal Vision vs. Text-Based Parsing: Benchmarking LLM Strategies for Invoice Processing,” arXiv:2509.04469 (2025). Accuracy is the share of fields extracted exactly right after minimal normalization. The authors note their datasets are open source and may appear in model training data.