# Snap Receipt: receipts, costed to the job > Snap Receipt reads every line of a supply-counter receipt, files it under the right supplier and costs it to the right job. Built for tradespeople. Where the AI is used, and where it isn't. Source: https://ahmedprime.dev/projects/snap-receipt # Snap Receipt - Status Live - Platforms iPhone · Android - Since February 2026 - Stack Flutter · TypeScript · Hono · PostgreSQL · BullMQ · MCP - Last shipped 2026-10-01 - Links - [snap-receipt.app](https://snap-receipt.app) - [App Store](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/snap-receipt-expense-tracker/id6764552545) - [Google Play](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appsvanta.expense_tracker) What did that job actually cost? Most tradespeople find out at tax time. From a shoebox. Photograph a supply-counter receipt. Snap Receipt reads every line item, files it under the right supplier and costs it to the right job. You know what a job has cost so far, in money and in materials, and you can show the client where the money went. ![A Home Depot receipt read by Snap Receipt on Android: PTFE tape, saw blades and nitrile gloves, each line with its quantity and unit price, filed under Materials, $51.07 in all, and a job one tap away.](/_astro/snap-receipt-line-items.CRWRbV8q_Z18f6H3.jpg) - [snap-receipt.app](https://snap-receipt.app) - [App Store](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/snap-receipt-expense-tracker/id6764552545) - [Google Play](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appsvanta.expense_tracker) ## Who it's for Plumbers, electricians, HVAC techs, handymen, mobile mechanics, builders and fitters. Solo operators and crews of up to five. Not household budgets. Not invoicing, payroll or bank reconciliation. ## Built for consumers, kept by tradespeople Snap Receipt launched as a consumer spending app, with budgets, shopping lists and subscription detection. In June 2026 the usage data told a different story: the people who stayed were self-employed trade contractors, using it as a receipt shoebox for their jobs. So I rebuilt the product around jobs, suppliers and clients, and shipped it on 2 August. The consumer features weren't hidden behind a setting. They were deleted, and their endpoints answer 410 so old app versions get a clean answer. Tax figures became a by-product instead of the point. ## What it does - **Line-item scanning.** Merchant, date, taxes, tips, fees, total, payment method, and every line with quantity and unit price. A 60-line supply-house invoice gives you 60 items. - **Bad scans get flagged.** Unreadable receipts are flagged, likely duplicates are caught, and photos that aren't receipts are rejected. - **Jobs, clients and budgets.** Live job cost by category and supplier, with budget alerts. - **One supplier, however it's spelled.** Five spellings of the same supply house add up to one real total. - **Price history.** What you paid for that fitting last month, and where it was cheaper. - **Reports** for clients and accountants: job cost, client expenses, supplier spend, quarterly figures. PDF and CSV. - **Ask.** A question in plain English, answered from your own records. - **Your AI assistant, connected** (on Pro). Claude, ChatGPT, Codex and Grok can read your records through a secure connector, plus a plugin with five ready-made skills: job cost, supplier prices, quarter-end figures, client report, receipt clean-up. * ![Snap Receipt's dashboard on Android for July 2026: $10,968.35 across 47 receipts, Materials the top category, two active jobs, the receipts still to cost to a job, and the plan's scans used so far.](/_astro/snap-receipt-dashboard.BA43EN7b_ZNa8WD.jpg) Dashboard * ![Further down Snap Receipt's dashboard on Android: July's spending climbing through the month, and the total split by category, Materials and subcontractor labour first.](/_astro/snap-receipt-categories.Djjje33y_ZtW76G.jpg) Expenses by category * ![A job in Snap Receipt on Android: Flooring for the Johnson Residence, $3,050 spent of a $5,000 budget, where the money went, and buttons for the full report and the client expense report.](/_astro/snap-receipt-job.Bo58BSAx_1PILJ3.jpg) Job ## Where should AI be trusted with money? Only where you can check its work. **Extraction.** One structured call per receipt, against a strict schema. The prompt's first rule: *a wrong value is worse than an empty one.* The model never infers a missing amount and never "fixes" the arithmetic, so some receipts come back with a field for you to fill. An empty field gets noticed. A wrong one gets filed. Every receipt records which model read it, so the model can be swapped without losing the audit trail. **Ask.** The model is a query planner, not an oracle. It turns your question into a typed query. The server runs it, computes the figures and writes the answer. The model never sees your job, client or supplier names, and never produces a number. *Diagram: How Ask works in Snap Receipt: the model sees only the question and turns it into a typed query; the server runs the query against your records and computes every figure, so the model never sees a name or a number.* ### The connector (MCP) - Read-only by construction. Its 25 tools come from an explicit list, and the only one that changes anything is `switch_account`, which changes whose records you're reading, not the records. A test enforces it. - Sign-in through its own OAuth server: PKCE, single-use codes, the app's own email sign-in, and refresh tokens that rotate, where a replayed token revokes the chain. - A coverage tool tells the assistant which questions the data can't answer, like revenue or mileage, so it declines instead of guessing. - Receipt photos never leave the app. A permission check can be wrong. A tool that doesn't exist can't be called. ## Decisions ### Why is manual entry never limited? Because a tool that stops you recording the work is a tool you stop opening. AI scans cost money, so each plan includes a number of them. Typing a receipt in by hand is unlimited on every plan. ### How do you match suppliers without wrecking someone's data? A deterministic key plus a similarity score. Above one threshold it links automatically, above a lower one it suggests a merge, and a merge never destroys anything. A human's decision always outranks the matcher. ### How do you stop a new category shipping unreachable? The category list in the AI prompt is generated from the same table the tax report uses. One source, so they can't drift. ### What happens to old app versions when an endpoint goes away? Retired endpoints answer with a clean "gone", so old versions degrade politely instead of crashing. ### Technology choices | Layer | Choice | Why | | --------------- | -------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Mobile | Flutter, Riverpod 3, GoRouter, Dio | One codebase for iPhone and Android, on the same architecture as my other Flutter apps | | Subscriptions | RevenueCat | Store billing on both platforms through one entitlement model | | Backend | Node.js and Hono, use-case architecture | Every request runs through a use-case with its own context. Easy to test, easy to expose to agents | | Database | PostgreSQL with Drizzle ORM | Typed schema, migrations as code, line items as first-class rows | | Background work | Redis and BullMQ | Summaries, alerts and heavy jobs stay off the request path | | AI | Vercel AI SDK through OpenRouter, Zod schemas | The model is configuration. It moved from Gemini to an OpenAI model in September without a rewrite | | Agent access | MCP over streamable HTTP, its own OAuth server with PKCE | A standard door for Claude, ChatGPT and Codex | | Reports | Puppeteer | Pixel-accurate PDFs from HTML templates | | Monitoring | Sentry | Errors from the phone and the server in one place | ## The numbers - **934 commits since 11 February 2026.** One author. - **About 62,000 lines of Dart and 66,000 lines of TypeScript,** tests included. - **Version 26.10.1** on both stores, 1 October 2026. ## What this project says about how I work - I changed the audience when the usage data said to, and deleted what the new audience didn't need. - The model plans the query. The server computes every number the user acts on. **Still have questions?** [Ask the agent about this page](/ask?about=snap-receipt) - [How does Snap Receipt keep the AI away from the numbers?](/ask?about=snap-receipt\&q=How+does+Snap+Receipt+keep+the+AI+away+from+the+numbers%3F) - [Why did it pivot to tradespeople?](/ask?about=snap-receipt\&q=Why+did+it+pivot+to+tradespeople%3F) - [What can its MCP connector do?](/ask?about=snap-receipt\&q=What+can+its+MCP+connector+do%3F) Or [write to Ahmed](/contact)