I Built a Receipt Scanner. Here's Why.

For a while now, I've had a loose sense of what I spend each month. I knew the rough totals — but not what was driving them. A $223 Emerald City run shows up in my banking app as one line. What it doesn't show is that $94 of that was baby supplies, $78 was groceries, and $46 was two lunch combos from the deli. One transaction, three different spending categories — all collapsed into a single number.

Most budgeting tools I looked at required manual entry for every purchase. CIBC's 1stInsights is the closest thing to automatic — it categorises your account transactions and tracks your spending over time. But it still operates at the transaction level. It can tell you that you spent $50 at Massy and slot it into a category, not what that $50 contained.

What I wanted was line-item visibility — every item, categorised automatically, so I could see what was driving the totals up and where to cut back.

So I built Receipt Tracker.

How It Works

The idea is simple: photograph a receipt with your phone, and the app extracts every line item automatically — item name, quantity, price, and category. A few seconds later you have the full breakdown. Scan enough receipts over a month and the dashboard starts showing you patterns: how much went to groceries vs. household vs. dining, and which categories are creeping up.

The execution is less simple.

The Bajan Receipt Problem

There's no universal receipt format — every retailer configures their point-of-sale (POS) software differently, and the result is a mess of inconsistent layouts, abbreviations, and line-wrapping quirks. Generic receipt scanners aren't built to handle this. A few examples from local stores:

Weighed items span two lines. PriceSmart prints a weight-and-unit-price line, then the product name and total on the next line. A naive scanner treats those as two separate items. The app merges them into one: "Drumsticks — 0.862 kg — $17.20."

Combos aren't one line. A Chefette Mix & Match prints each sub-item separately. The app collapses them into a single entry so your spending total isn't inflated by phantom items.

Abbreviations are local. "C & P ROTI" and "DRMTS/FLATS" don't appear in any product database, but any Bajan knows what they mean. The app expands them — "C & P ROTI" becomes "Chicken & Potato Roti" in the notes field, categorised as Fast Food.

Dates are inconsistent. Some stores print DD/MM, others MM/DD, with no reliable marker. The app uses the store to determine which format applies.

Categories are tuned for what's actually on the receipt. A single supermarket trip might contain Meat, Baby Care, Household, Alcohol, and Skincare — all in one cart. The app assigns each item to its own subcategory rather than lumping everything under "Groceries."

What You Get

Once you've scanned a handful of receipts, the dashboard aggregates them by category across whatever time period you choose — week, month, year. You can click into any category to see the subcategory breakdown — and drill into each subcategory to see the individual items behind the total: what you bought, where, and when. Every item links back to the original receipt.

There's also a CSV export if you want to pull everything into a spreadsheet and do your own analysis.

It's focused on the receipts in your pocket — the spending that's hardest to break down and easiest to lose track of.

Try It

Receipt Tracker is free. You can scan up to two receipts without creating an account — just open the app, take a photo, and see the full breakdown. If you'd rather browse first, there's also a demo mode with three sample Bajan receipts — Massy, PriceSmart, Chefette — so you can explore the dashboard before scanning anything yourself.

Sign in with Google to keep your data, and it stays private — no one else can see your receipts or spending history.

It works in any browser, but you can also add it to your home screen and it runs like a regular app — no App Store needed.

→ app.bankinginbim.com

I've been using it for my own spending for the past week. That $223 Emerald City trip? I wouldn't have known $94 of it was baby supplies without scanning the receipt.