Show HN: Dump receipts as you get them through the year, recall them at tax time | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Dump receipts as you get them through the year, recall them at tax time

receiptapp.org

42 pointskayman50 comments

A few notes:

Please don't send me my password in plain text email (in fact, at all).

Please let me login with my email address.

Where can I actually see the receipts? The app seems like it's write-only.

Plain text passwords are bad, don't send it in the email at all. I hope they are stored as hashes and not plaintext on the app's end.

yes. they are stored as hashes salted on app end.

Receipt management is an itch I've wanted to scratch for many years and I always take an interest in other people's approaches in this space.

My initial reaction here is why you think it's reasonable to expect people to sign up for a service with no information or explanation about you? Given receipts can contain sensitive and important information, there is nothing on the website to convince me that I should entrust you with this data. In fact, quite the opposite.

I just wish that someone would create proper digital receipts - carrying around bits of paper (which are so easy to lose) feels ridiculously outdated to me.

So every time I make a payment with my cards - record a receipt somewhere that is digitally signed (or something, I don't care how it works) and has all of the tax information in some standard format.

There's a Portuguese company pushing for digital receipts[1].

That said, here in Portugal it's probably easier to get companies to do that because they're already compelled to create digital receipts and submit them monthly to the IRS. In fact, if you (as the consumer) give your tax ID when purchasing something - which you are not required to do, mind you - you can then see your invoices on the IRS website.

[1] https://www.papervault.pt/

My wallet's receipt to cash ratio is at least 10:1 at all times. I hate it!

I've been to a small (physical) business where the receipts are only emailed. They ask you at the end "would you like the receipt emailed to you?" There's no printer.

Of course that also means you have to annoyingly enter your email address. They just hand you the "register" to type your email address. The "register" is an iPad.

I hate that too, even though I don't want a paper receipt I want to be spammed by Pottery Barn even less.

My ideal solution: a NFC thingy (transmitter?) at the register where I can just tap my phone and the receipt is beamed to me without exposing my data or forcing me into a marketing database.

I believe receipts would be a good application for QR codes. The reason being that that the store probably has a screen that can display the receipt QR code and a majority of smartphones support QR codes but not NFC (e.g. iPhones).

Yep, my thoughts exactly.

Doing something like this would be about more than just receipts as well - it would be a step towards taking ownership of your transaction data so rather than it being owned by a variety of banks, it's all centralised in one place.

My words. No imprimt, no contact, nothing. It's hard to build trust, but it's not hard to not build it.

3 wrong approaches towards UX/Security 1. Extracting username from email 2. Extracting password from email and setting it same as username 3. sending password in plain text email.

First alternative: take photo of receipt using phone's default camera app, e-mail photo to yourself putting tags in subject line, file in "Receipts" folder of your e-mail app on PC. No need for this or any other app you don't already have, and no risk of exposing your info to third party (any more than you already do with e-mail).

Second alternative: throw receipt away and record info in Quicken/Quickbooks/etc. when you get your monthly statement. Assumes you can remember details at that time and that you use credit card for all but insignificant expenses. You could also save receipt just long enough to enter details as above ahead of your statement.

  > Second alternative: throw receipt away

What?!? In the UK Inland revenue can demand your receipts for the past 7 years. To say that you've thrown them away is a great way to ensure you get a very thorough investigation.

Apparently it infers a username from your submitted email address. However, the username key is set as unique and errors out, dumping its debug info on the page:

<class 'psycopg2.IntegrityError'> at /register duplicate key value violates unique constraint "rcpts_user_user_login_key" DETAIL: Key (user_login)=(receiptapp) already exists. Python /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/web/db.py in _db_execute, line 586 Web POST https://receiptapp.org/register

I would /love/ something that made it really easy to take care of my receipts - that is definitely a problem for me.

I'm not sure what to make of this, however. I signed up and decided to test the service by uploading a receipt (which was actually a random image from the BBC News website). This worked fine, but I have /no idea/ where the receipt is now. What I really want is a dashboard where I can see everything I've uploaded. (If you want an example of a company that does this very well, take a look at Inoviceable).

I agree with some of the security issues that have been raised already. I don't like having e-mails sent to me with plain text passwords - what if I am on the train and someone reads the password over my shoulder? What if this password is exactly the same password that I use for everything?

Secondly, don't forget that receipts will (potentially) contain a lot of sensitive financial information, e.g. your card number. I imagine you could phone up a bank and convince them it was you by talking about some of your purchases - which you could do if you had access to a load of receipts.

TL;DR: It's definitely a problem I'm looking to solve, but I worry about the UX/security of your solution.

"Snap: Take a photo, Tag: Name it, Save: Email it 'into your shoebox'"

Why not "Snap: Take a photo... Later, copy them to a folder on your PC"?

I've tried this solution myself, but I find the later copy them to a folder on PC never happens. The receipts build up and when i do remember, i'm not at my pc.

When i am at my pc, i forget to copy them from my phone.

I wanted something more instant

I don't know how relevant this is, but I have a similar pain but it's not associated with tax time.

If I'm going to be at a client location for a few weeks I need to save every receipt I get then I need to invoice the entire lump. It's a mind-numbing process.

On my last trip I had 97 receipts, it was an absolute pain, luckily I had a 10 hour flight to do it over.

In a perfect world I'd take a photo and it would OCR what it can and then voice prompt me for notes. That way I could just snap a photo and speak into my phone something like "£37 for pints... I mean dinner at the Old Flaming Hen".

When it comes time to actually use these receipts then I could download the lot of them and send them off as part of my invoice.

A small but VERY nice feature would be giving the file names something relevant as normally I have to upload them one at a time. Instead of DCR0299.jpeg if they could be "01-17-2014 23:11 £37 for pints... I mean dinner at the Old Flaming Hen.jpeg" then they'd be much easier to find when accounting asks me questions.

I haven't seen much in this space, maybe I'm not looking in the right places or there isn't a very big market.

There are plenty of similar services out there. Some I found (while researching on a receipt app concept):

https://www.shoeboxed.com http://justthebill.com http://texthog.com https://receiptloader.com http://abukai.com http://www.receipt-bank.com http://expensify.com

The lack of contact details or any details (terms of service, privacy, etc.) makes me a bit wary about trying the service. While I can appreciate that you want to keep the app clean and easy to use, some basic information (maybe a tutorial video) will bring you a long way. I don't see any information on pricing either. If you are giving it away for free, that's great, but there should be information that this indeed is the case, or that it's easy to export my bills in the case that you run out of money funding an app that doesn't generate cash.

P.S. your demo account took me all of 2 tries to guess the password, so you might want to change that. I'd email you if there were any contact details on your page.

same - took me 2 attempts to get access to the demo account - also your register page exposes a whole bunch of information if that username is already taken.

I don't want to tag anything. I want to tap the screen under two times to take a photo then have the software do everything else.

phone on -- unlock to homescreen --> tap icon --> take picture

Without OCR or any sort of integration/budgeting this is essentially a folder full of pictures of my financial information on someone else's computer. There is no value add.

Once I start tagging stuff, that's too much work. I might as well just toss the receipt and then figure it out whenever I try to balance my accounts in ynab like I do right now.

No information on the website and it doesn't answer the key question. Why is this better than doing the same thing in Evernote? Evernode's free level is plenty for storing receipts.

My alternative: 1. Toss receipts into a file folder per month. Time: <5 seconds per receipt. 2. At tax time, go through receipts and pull out tax related ones. Time: 30-45 minutes. Total time spent: an order of magnitude less than imaging/uploading receipts over the year. Security: never leaves your house. Cost: 12 file folders. Additional benefit: easy to find receipts by month for returns or disputes. Don't have to reprint receipts.

A similar German Startup in the same field just failed: https://www.reposito.com/

Wow, is this an EB-MVP (Extra Bare MVP) or what?!?

Might be a good idea to fix your security first before going public, sending passwords as plaintext is not a good idea.

If you have your ex's receipts from the past few months, you can determine where/when she habitually shops and you can go harass and threaten him or her. I hope their security team is aware of this, especially since they are sending users' passwords over plaintext.

I am happily using Scanbot [1] with direct Evernote and Dropbox integration. Why should I use your service over that? Try to sell it to me :)

[1] https://scanbot.io/en/

I look forward to the day all your receipts will go directly to an email address associated with your credit card (or to a database on your credit card website) rather than needing to play the paper receipt game for returns/taxes, etc.

This sounds similar to OneReceipt[1].

Were you aware of OneReceipt? Will this app be better, different, etc.?

[1] https://www.onereceipt.com

How is this different from using one of the popular "scanner" apps for iOS/Android + auto-upload to Evernote? Works pretty well for me.

What are people doing with their taxes to need a significant number of receipts at tax time? The two largest cases I know of are business expenses and charitable donations; the former doesn't apply to the vast majority of people, and for the latter, do people really have so many of those receipts that they can't keep up with them?

And in both cases, you wouldn't need the receipts at tax time, just the amounts; you'd only need the receipts for a possible audit.

nice!, does it have OCR?

no OCR. It's a feature i considered but then wasn't sure how useful it'd be. Most of the time i just need to recall my receipts and hand them to my accountant. And there are apps that do OCR better. Didn't want to get stuck into the OCR sucks problem.

Emailing passwords to users in plain text? round of applause

Time for grumpy HN comment #1:

Sounds like a perfect candidate for a "Thanks for being part of our incredible journey, we have been acquired by ntrepnr! Isn't that awesome and wonderfully great! Oh, by the way, you have 7 days until we delete all your receipts." ;)

Why would you put important things like these in the butt? Why does one need an account? Why share receipts with a third party?

What is your exit strategy? Do you have export functionality already built? Where are the terms of service? Privacy policy? How is the project funded?

  Why would you put important things like these in the butt

Did you just get hoisted by Cloud-To-Butt[1]?

[1] https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt

Thanks for the clarification. I thought it was a typo for bucket.

I like to provide the joys of it for people who don't have it installed. ;)

You would still have your sent emails, and could simply filter by recipient and date to get them back.

Which raises the question... why would people not simply email a /dev/null email address to achieve precisely the same effect ?

I use the sent emails sent feature if an "oh shit, something went wrong" moment happens as i develop.

Regarding your question: why would people not simply email a /dev/null email address and achieve precisely the same effect?

That is a hacker way to solve the problem. Before receiptapp, I kept track of my own documents via gmail. Setup a filter for myusername+document@gmail.com to tag and auto archive it.

It worked okay but didn't feel quite right.

The end result I'm trying to achieve is: A place as reliable and simple as your shoebox at home.

For some reason, sent email doesn't feel right in that regard.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll be sure to be address these issues on the website. I haven't thought that far into it. It's still in scratch my own itch phase.

And..how is this better than a shoe box all things considered?

You don't have to carry it with you. You don't have to worry about fire. The organizational benefits of going digital.

Well you don't go around carrying receipts in my experience except as long as it takes to put them in the box, fire is a legitimate concern I guess, organization benefits are minimal if someone else is doing your books for you. All in all it looks like a solution in search of a problem but I guess time will tell.

>What is your exit strategy? Do you have export functionality already built? Where are the terms of service? Privacy policy? How is the project funded?

I feel bad about this having gone through it myself. You'll get screamed at for not pushing an MVP fast enough. On the other hand, you get screamed at for not having a VP that is polished. Frankly, I think things have tilted in the last four years so now a more polished VP is needed than the MVPs you could get away with four years ago, but it is still hard when these other folks are constantly yelling at you about MVPs.

I know the feeling :) I'm just happy to get some feedback. For example, I didn't think of building an export functionality, but I find that now a mandatory feature. I'd find it useful for myself.

I never realized how important the privacy policy and terms of service were, but its a small fix.

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