How to Scan Faded Thermal Receipts

Thermal receipts are a miracle of efficiency—until they're not. Because they use heat instead of ink, they are incredibly sensitive to sunlight, heat, and even the oils on your skin. If you've ever pulled a blank white slip out of your wallet, you know the pain. Here's how to recover data from faded receipts and prevent it from happening again.

The "Flash" Trick

If a receipt is slightly faded but the indentations are still there, try taking a photo with your phone's flash ON. The harsh, direct light often creates shadows in the micro-indentations of the paper, making the text legible enough for AI OCR to pick up.

High-Contrast Filtering

Most scanning apps (including Ai Receipt Scanner) allow you to apply filters. For faded receipts, the High Contrast Black & White filter is your best friend. It pushes the "gray" text towards black and the "off-white" paper towards pure white, often revealing hidden text.

Gentle Heat (The Last Resort)

This is risky! If a receipt is completely white, some people have had success by very gently warming the back of the receipt with a hair dryer on its lowest setting. Because the whole paper is heat-sensitive, the entire receipt will turn dark, but sometimes the text areas turn dark at a different rate, providing a split second of legibility. Warning: You can easily ruin the receipt forever with this method.

Prevention: The Only Real Solution

Thermal receipts will always fade. The only way to "fix" a faded receipt is to have scanned it when it was fresh. This is why a "scan immediately" habit is the most important part of expense management.