Know what you spend. Receipt scanner

getmore4less

fiendishlyclever wrote: »

Have a look at one of the apps that support open banking as they will categorise your expenses for you (as do the challenger heels)

I've not used any personally but video adverts for Yolt keep popping up in my games...

Open banking can't categorise a spend effectively if you categorise at a low level.

A supermarket spend can be many categories.
Even a restaurant bill will be food drink tip minimum.

DCFC79

yellow218 wrote: »

Hi all

This may be taking money saving a bit far but hubby and I like to know what we spend and where we spend it.

I’m trying to find an app that can help with this. My ideal scenario:
1) the app is free (or very cheap)
2) you can scan a receipt with an I phone and the app automatically recognises the date, the amount and the store.
3) for each receipt you can allocate a spend category
4) you can personalise the categories
5) you can export as an csv doc.

So far all the apps I’ve found are for small businesses rather than personal finance, and you can’t personalise the categories.

Does anyone use an app that does what I’m looking for please? If not I’m tempted to build an app, would other people use it?

Monzo can is 1, can definitely do 2 (you find the relevant payment and choose to scan the receipt) & 5.
Monzo categorises the spends but you can change them in the app eg change it from Groceries to Shopping. Don't think you can add a new category.
For each category you can adjust the budget.


OP its not an app I would use since I'm using Monzo.

Zero_Sum

yellow218 wrote: »

Yes. But I’m looking to avoid manual entry.

Maybe I’m asking too much.

A big disadvatange with an automated system is that you'd have no control over categories (and quite often the text on a receipt can be ambiguous for a scanner anyway) So you'd only end up spending lots of time editing them and you might as well just do it yourself in the first place.

buglawton

I just use Dropbox app which scans receipts into a neat 'flat' image. I save the image with a name that includes the item paid for and if appropriate the price. A bit of manual effort but does the job. Any app with optical character recognition is getting into paid for service territory and possibly privacy issues.

realaledrinker

Starling does this although the categorisation can be a bit iffy (I suspect this is more a function of how retailers have declared themselves rather than the bank)

yellow218

getmore4less wrote: »

Tracking is a lot easier when you are working to plan because as you buy you have the plan in mind not later when you are seeing what you spent.

Thank you. Yes I agree. This is not new to me. I’ve been tracking at a detailed level for years. I don’t have a pc, I have a Mac. I’m not aware that there is a Mac version of ms money available but I’m happy with the set up I have for budgeting and monitoring overall.

The reason I’m looking to somehow capture receipts is our method of payment has recently changed to a prepaid card where individual transactions are not available so we will have to take more effort in capturing those transactions. I was hoping to avoid manual entry for every transaction but maybe I can’t.

pafpcg

You want to scan receipts? You'll have fun with a two-foot long supermarket receipt! (Many have printing on the reverse that is visible through the paper and some printers won't print clearly.)

Why not start a campaign for retailers with loyalty cards to make the data for all your purchases available to you? The retailer is analysing your purchasing data for their own purposes - making the data available to us should be part of the loyalty card "bargain". Won't work for Aldi/Lidl yet, but customer pressure would soon fix that....

PS: My partner, since she went to college many decades ago, has collected all items of expenditure in her diary which were totted up annually. Once we had spreadsheets, the items were rekeyed and allocated to individual budget categories (food, housewares, transport, etc), then cross-checked with bank & credit-card statements. Now we key the receipts straight into a spreadsheet. So, yes, I'd love to gain access to the retailer's transactions database.

sausage_time

If you have a convenient and portable way of capturing manually, that would be the best in my opinion. I use a custom app (wot I wrote) on my phone, but you could quite easily set up a Google sheet or Excel spreadsheet and set up a drop-down choice for categories. It just becomes a matter of capturing each transaction as it happens (or hanging onto the receipt until convenient). I reconcile with my bank(s) from time to time to make sure I have not missed anything (and that there are no other surprises).

sassy_one

Working with a techie friend sounds cheesy, as does the fact any saving would be wiped out given itll cost thousands to make an app.

Get out more.

eddddy

There are 'Business Expenses' apps that could probably be customised to do what you want - but they are probably more complex than you need, and perhaps too expensive.

They're intended for people travelling on business, so they let you do things like...

• Take a photo of a restaurant receipt - the app would attempt to automatically scan/read the info on the receipt and create an expense line item for it

• Take a photo of (or scan) a credit card statement - the app would scan/read it, and allow you to pick out entries and create expense line items for them

The photos are automatically sent to a server for scanning, so there is plenty of processing power (and potentially AI) for 'reading' and interpreting the info on the receipts.