Scan a Receipt and Eider Fills In the Shared Expense

Scan a receipt with your phone and Eider reads it. The merchant, the total and the date come back filled in, you check them, and the expense joins the nest with your standing split already applied.

It does not have to be paper. A screenshot out of your photos works, and so does a PDF. Amazon is the common case: screenshot the order, upload it, and you get the expense filled in and the record kept.

It is easier than typing the details in. Eider reads the line items too. They do not show up on the review screen, and they are what Patterns will draw on later.

Scanning is part of Plus, and so is Patterns. The capture is three steps.

1. 1
   You add the receiptTake a photo, choose a screenshot from your photos, or upload a PDF. One page or several, staged as you go, so a half-finished capture survives closing the app.
2. 2
   Eider reads itMerchant, total, date, tax and tip, and the card's last four where the receipt carries them.
3. 3
   You check it, then saveEvery figure is a draft until you agree with it.

Add each page and Eider reads the whole thing at once. What comes back depends on what the receipt carries. A parking stub gives a total and a date and nothing else. A grocery receipt gives forty lines, a subtotal, tax, and the last four digits of the card.

The read fills in an expense for you to check: the merchant, a title, a category, the total, the date, the currency, and tax and tip where they are printed. Everything Eider reads back is editable. Tap a figure to correct it.

On a restaurant slip the subtotal and the tax are machine-printed and the total is written by hand. Where the printed figures add up to more than the handwritten total, Eider opens the review at the printed sum instead, because the paper has already said which of the two reads is the doubtful one.

Once you save, nothing about the expense is special. It sits in the feed with everything else and divides by the nest's standing split, exactly as an expense somebody typed would.

Most receipts are shared whole or not at all, and the standing split has already answered those. The exception is the receipt that is only partly shared: you did a grocery run for the house and the wine is yours, or one person's shampoo rides on a bill that is otherwise the week's food. The receipt says $84 and the shared part of it is $61, and the only place that figure exists is on the paper.

A photo does not solve this. Attaching an image keeps the evidence and leaves the work where it was: somebody still has to read the lines, decide which were shared, and total them.

So Eider reads the lines. After a receipt is saved, a second read goes back over the image and pulls out the individual items, which is why they are not on the screen you just reviewed. They arrive behind it and stay with the receipt.

Every receipt stays attached to the expense it came from, and every one captured in the nest also lands in the nest's receipt library. The library and its search stay with the subscriber, not with the members an annual membership covers.

Search covers the merchant, the expense title and the notes rather than the text inside the image, so you search by the name of the place: the plumber who came out in the spring, the shop that sold you the dishwasher, the hotel two people are still squaring up over.

Scanning is Plus. The library and its search are Plus. Everything the shared record is made of is free and stays free: nests, expenses, the standing split, repeating expenses, balances and settling up, with no member cap and no expense cap. Nothing that is free today moves behind the paywall later, and Plus adds on top of the free product rather than unlocking it. What Plus will add is set out on the home page.

A year later the receipt is still attached to the expense, and the merchant's name is how you find it.