I just sent this to the Beancount mailing list, but thought I would cross-post it here as well...
Hello Friends,
I am very pleased to announce that I have switched careers and should no longer have to travel all the time, so now I can get back to working on many projects I have wanted to since years now. 
One of those is dealing with the tedium of paper receipts in a more automated way.
I have been looking for some kind of receipt OCR for years now. I even played with some of the F/LOSS OCR tools which are available, but even there it seems to me you have to tweak them to get good results I think. Or maybe I was just bad at it. 
Anyway at some point I realized the best way might just be to pay someone to figure out all those fiddly details.
Now it turns out I didn't even need to pay any money after all! Anyway, I'm just trying to illustrate my thought process here.
So finally I stumbled across this Veryfi API. I am sure there are others but so far I found this works very well and very accurately. I have been really happpy with it.
You can get up to 100 API calls per month for free with a developer account (which I was able to obtain without any trouble). And that is enough for my personal needs.
I thought others might find this interesting, so I wanted to share it with the list. I would encourage you to make a developer account (you can even get a 2 week free trial I think first) and just upload some recipts via their web interface, and see how accurate it is for you.
I have no affiliation with them, just been looking for something like this for years.
Now, I prefer to work in Emacs Lisp (rather than Python) so of course the next thing was writing a front-end to this API for Emacs. I realize less of you are probably interested in that, but I thought I would mention it anyway. It has been working flawless for me, I just need to write a README and publish it. Maybe if there was some interest it might motivate me to do so, sooner. 
Cheers!