

Show HN: Dump receipts as you get them through the year, recall them at tax time - kayman
https://receiptapp.org/

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icebraining
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.

~~~
coaxial
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.

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

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lukebennett
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.

~~~
arethuza
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around bits of paper (which are so easy to lose) feels ridiculously outdated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.

~~~
aestra
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.

~~~
jbigelow76
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.

~~~
jaredtking
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).

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irfan
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.

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Involute
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.

~~~
ColinWright

      > 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.

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nexxer
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](https://receiptapp.org/register)

------
christudor
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.

------
Fragment
"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"?

~~~
kayman
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

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columbo
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.

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

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

------
blackdogie
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.

~~~
steelcm
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.

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dammitcoetzee
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.

------
WayneS
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.

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MyDogHasFleas
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.

------
oevi
A similar German Startup in the same field just failed:
[https://www.reposito.com/](https://www.reposito.com/)

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

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

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afarrell
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.

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jrnkntl
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/](https://scanbot.io/en/)

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RankingMember
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.

------
ethagnawl
This sounds similar to OneReceipt[1].

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

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

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

------
JoshTriplett
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.

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ergodic
nice!, does it have OCR?

~~~
kayman
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.

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codeoclock
Emailing passwords to users in plain text? _round of applause_

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hnha
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?

~~~
jffry

      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](https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt)

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

