Bagging: Receipts & Expenses
Free iPhone receipt keeper: snap a receipt, it reads the ven
Every April my partner and I would dig through a box of faded thermal receipts. Half were blank. In Canada the CRA can ask for receipts up to six years back, and thermal paper does not last two.
So I built Bagging on nights and weekends. You snap a receipt once, on-device text recognition reads the vendor, total, and date, and the photo stays attached. Everything sits in a dated list you can tag by job or category and export as CSV or PDF when tax time comes.
It is deliberately simple: no bank connections, no line items, no per-scan meter. Free on the App Store, iPhone only for now.
Happy to answer anything about the build (SwiftUI + Cloudflare Workers) or the boring-but-real world of receipt keeping.
3 Comments
I'm curious what you've learned from the people already using it. Was there anything about how they actually think about keeping receipts that challenged one of your original assumptions behind the product?
The big one for me was categorization. I assumed people wouldn't bother — the receipts get handed to a CPA at year-end anyway, so why would anyone sort them? I almost didn't ship tags at all.
Turns out over 90% of new records get tagged. People aren't doing it for the accountant — they're doing it for themselves. Even folks who fully outsource their taxes still want to glance at where the money is going while the year is happening, not in April.
So I'm building that into the product now: an insights view that shows spending broken down by tag. The archive-for-the-audit part was my original vision, but users quietly voted for "show me my spending" with their behavior, and 90% is hard to argue with.
That's a really interesting takeaway. I'd enjoy comparing a few more observations outside the thread. What's the best email to reach you on?