Review of Lemon, Which Turns Paper Receipts Into Digital Versions | Hacker News Reader

Review of Lemon, Which Turns Paper Receipts Into Digital Versions

bucks.blogs.nytimes.com

30 pointsdonohoe21 comments

Why doesn't Mint introduce this to their service? Having financial info in the same place as my digital receipts just makes sense. It would also allow better classification of purchases.

Agreed. This would make a better killer feature of Mint than it does a standalone product.

For now I'll sit around wishing Mint would acquire them.

Wishing Intuit would acquire them, right?

Yes, thanks for the clarification.

This stood out:

> Lemon’s name is derived, he says, from a Web site address he had purchased years ago; it made sense for this venture, he said, because it’s easy to remember and it reflects the process of making the “lemonade” of digital receipts out of the “lemons” represented by paper versions.

My initial reaction was that this seemed like a terrible way to choose a brand name; then I thought, is it really any worse than anything else? (The justification is a little iffy, though. Better just to say it doesn't really mean anything at all...)

I can't get over the extremely negative connotation I have with the word lemon. Not "lemons," which sound nice and zesty. But a "lemon" which sounds like a regretted crappy purchase.

Some people put way too much weight on such names.

Try the app first - then make up your mind - I am trying it now - but I am currently in Nome AK - and the inet latency is incredibly high.

shrug

I'm not sure "largest remaining tropical rainforest" is what you want people buying paper books to be thinking about, but it turned out OK for Amazon

The IRS, at least, accepts digital copies of receipts: http://www.irs.gov/publications/p552/ar02.html#en_US_publink...

I've used Shoeboxed since 2008 to keep all my receipts, so I don't have to physically store anything. I don't actually like Shoeboxed. However, it syncs with my accounting application (Outright) and there's no better option which does this.

I hope Lemon works on their integrations—viewing receipts with a single click from your accounting application is the killer feature.

> Mr. Casares says the app is targeted at consumer users; eventually, it may seek to make money by selling aggregated, anonymous shopping data compiled from its user base to businesses.

How feasible is it for Lemon Inc. to use the receipt data to deduce information useful for stock bets well ahead of earnings reports and the like?

For those who may remember Bling Nation, Lemon is what's left of it. (Wencesao was the co-founder of Bling Nation and the Lemon app's Android package is com.blingnation.)

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.blingnation

"Wences Casares, a co-founder of Lemon, said the company checked with 300 merchants and more than 95 percent accepted the picture in the phone, while the rest requested a printed copy of it."

... It wasn't that long ago that every company required the original receipt. It's basic fraud prevention.

I'd like to see a list of accepting/rejecting retailers, because this seems quite strange to me. A lot of companies use anti-fraud paper and secure inks to reduce alteration of receipts. I would expect that loss prevention groups would be less than thrilled with this app.

Really? I assumed large retailers are pulling up an internal record of the original purchase when you make a return.

Many retailers still sync up daily via batch processes creating a race condition where copies of a real receipt could be used at multiple locations on the same day.

There are also issues with exception handling processes that dictate what clerks are to do if there's a problem with a receipt that are likely exploitable if photo receipts are accepted.

As it stands these holes exist but the harm is reduced by the fact that if you want a fake receipt, you need the right receipt paper and printing equipment which basically means that only professional criminals have a shot at exploiting the problem.

I was really excited to try this out, and I just uploaded a receipt. However, they don't appear to be itemizing the receipts, so for a receipt I happened to have in my wallet for a lunch with 4 separately priced items, I can only see the total on the site.

Am I missing something? This is basically useless to me without that feature. Is there any service that exists right now that supports this? (preferably with an Android app)

edit

The screenshots on the Android mkt show itemized receipts, so maybe it's a paid feature. I've emailed support asking about it, but in any case, they appear to support this or plan to. Nice!

It seems every week another service comes out that makes me weigh the value of my privacy. If I used this, Lemon would have a staggering amount of data about me, but it sounds so darn useful!

Question for those who've used this, how does it handle really long receipts that don't fit in one picture?

Does anyone know if the government, Canadian in my case, will accept computerized receipts like this for tax purposes?

90% of the tax documents I keep are receipts. It would be nice to get ride of most of this stuff.

I'm guessing the HN + NYT coverage is making this site run dog slow.

Crap. I pitched this idea to about 10 people (other devs) last year and couldn't get anyone interested in trying it with me.

I obviously need to work on my sales skills.

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