TauDesignWorks Vellum

Vellum · private expense capture

Scan it. Say it.
Filed.

Vellum turns a photo of a receipt into a clean, categorized expense in under fifteen seconds — and keeps every dollar of it on your device, under your name, out of everyone else's reach.

Join the waitlist See how it works

In development for iPhone & iPad, iOS 18 and later · No account · Works fully offline

A quick listen

You

Scan — lunch with a client.

Vellum

Blackbird Supply, forty-eight twenty, on March 4th. Merchant, date and total all confirmed. The tax looks like three sixty, but I'm not certain — one field to check before you save. Nothing files itself.

An illustration of how Vellum reads a field back, not a live model. Every value returns with a confidence mark you confirm.

Where Vellum fits

The whole app is a receipt and a sentence

Expense apps love to hand you a form — a dozen fields to hunt for and fill in, on the phone, at the end of a long day. Vellum does the tedious part for you: it reads the receipt, works out the merchant, date, total and tax, and asks only for the one thing it can't see — what the expense was for.

Then it shows you what it found, each value marked with how sure it is, and waits. Nothing files itself. The drudgery is the app's job; the judgment stays yours. When it's right, you save with one tap. When a field is uncertain, it's flagged before you ever commit it — not buried in a total you'd have to double-check later.

What Vellum does

Fast to capture, honest about what it read

Every step has a spoken path and a typed one, and the whole review-and-save flow works with VoiceOver alone — the receipt image is never required.

  • Scan and extract

    Point the camera. Vellum finds the receipt, straightens and enhances it, then reads it on-device — no perfect framing, no login, no upload.

  • Say what it was for

    Tell Vellum the business purpose in one sentence and it suggests a category. Prefer to type? Typing is always an equal path, never a fallback.

  • A confidence mark on every field

    Merchant, date, total, tax — each returns with how sure Vellum is. Anything uncertain is flagged first and held for review before it's ever saved.

  • Private by default

    The AI runs on your device to start. Nothing you scan — image or text — leaves it unless you choose that, one clear decision at a time.

  • Reports your accountant can read

    Export CSV, PDF, or a zip of receipt images, filtered by date, category, client or project — generated and reviewable entirely by voice.

  • iPhone and iPad, in your iCloud

    Snap in the field on your phone, tidy up at the desk on your iPad. Your expenses follow you through your own private iCloud — never our servers.

Fifteen seconds, four moves

No forms to wade through

The tedious part is the app's job; the judgment stays yours. Every move has a spoken twin and a typed one.

  1. Scan

    Point the camera. Vellum finds the receipt, straightens it, and reads it on-device — no perfect framing required.

  2. Say

    Tell it what the expense was for in one sentence. Prefer to type? Typing is always an equal path, never a fallback.

  3. Review

    Merchant, date, total, tax — each returns with a confidence mark. Anything uncertain is flagged before it's saved.

  4. Save

    Filed, searchable, and ready to export as CSV, PDF, or a zip of receipts whenever your accountant asks.

Where your data lives

Your money's business is nobody else's

There are two separate questions here, and Vellum keeps them separate so you always know the answer: where your data is stored, and whether any AI ever sees it. Both are answered in your favor, and the active setting is visible whenever you capture or review.

  • Stored on your device. Every receipt, amount and note lives locally. Your expenses never travel to a server of ours — there's nothing of yours on our side to breach.
  • Synced through your own iCloud. Turn on sync and your expenses move between iPhone and iPad through your private iCloud — the same place your photos already live. Not ours. Never ours.
  • AI on your terms. Reading and reasoning run on-device by default. Cloud help is opt-in, one clear decision at a time — never a background default, never without asking.
  • When a receipt won't read, you can send that one image to the cloud with a single, explicit tap — and it comes back with the same honest confidence marks, never laundered as certain.

What it costs

Fair by default

No forced subscription to do the thing the app is for. You pay for convenience, and for cloud help — only when you actually use them.

  • The essentials are free. Capture, store, search and export, with no account and no subscription. On-device AI reads most receipts at no cost, for good.
  • Upgrade only if you want to. Power tools — batch import, folder watching, richer exports, extended sync — are a simple upgrade. The core stays free whether you take it or not.
  • Cloud help, only when it helps. For the rare receipt on-device can't crack, cloud AI is pay-as-you-go — and you're charged only when it actually works. Bring your own AI key and pay the provider directly instead, if you'd rather.

Not a settings page

Accessibility is the substrate

Vellum is built by a developer with low vision, for people who need software to work the first time, every time. That's not a marketing angle — it's the reason the app exists, and it shapes every screen.

  • The fields are the truth, not the photo. You can file an expense start to finish with VoiceOver alone — the extracted values are the source of truth, and the receipt image is only ever supplementary.
  • Every field speaks its confidence. VoiceOver reads each value along with whether it's confirmed or flagged, across capture, review and reports.
  • Dynamic Type to the largest sizes, with no truncation or clipping in any core flow, plus real high-contrast and dark modes and full reduced-motion respect.
  • Charts always carry a plain-text summary and a navigable data table — no insight lives in color or shape alone.

Questions

Frequently asked

Does Vellum need an account or the internet?

Neither. There's no login and no cloud account. Vellum captures, reads, stores and exports entirely on your device, and works completely offline the day you install it. Optional iCloud sync and optional cloud AI are the only things that ever use the network — and both are yours to turn on.

What will it cost?

The essentials — capture, on-device reading, storage, search and export — are free and stay free. A premium upgrade adds workflow power tools like batch import and richer exports, and cloud reads for stubborn receipts are pay-as-you-go, charged only when they deliver a usable result. Exact prices will be announced closer to launch.

Where do my receipts and expenses go?

They stay on your device. If you turn on sync, they move between your iPhone and iPad through your own private iCloud database — never a TauDesignWorks server. The only time anything leaves is a cloud AI read you ask for by name, one receipt at a time.

Which devices does it support?

Vellum is built for iPhone and iPad together from day one, on iOS and iPadOS 18 and later — a bottom tab bar on iPhone, a sidebar on iPad, adaptive to each.

When can I get it?

Vellum is in active development and not yet released. Join the waitlist and you'll be among the first invited when the beta opens. We're not announcing a firm date yet.

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Part of the TauDesignWorks suite