How it works
Five steps, of which exactly one needs your attention. Here is what happens to a receipt between the shop and a price history.
- 1
Capture the receipt
About five seconds
In the shop, on the way out, photograph the receipt. The camera opens straight into capture rather than into a file picker, because the alternative is a receipt that goes in a pocket and is dealt with never.
If the roll is too long for one frame, take two or three overlapping shots. They are kept together as pages of the same purchase. If your store emails a PDF instead, upload that, and several at once if they have piled up.
- 2
It gets read
Twenty to thirty seconds
The image goes to a vision model that returns the receipt as structured lines rather than as text: store, date, and for each line the printed product text, quantity, unit price, amount paid and any discount.
Long receipts are read in overlapping bands rather than all at once. A single pass over a tall image forces the model to work at a reduced resolution, and the first thing that suffers is the digits in the price column — which are the only part that matters.
- 3
You check it
Half a minute
Basket shows you what it read and waits. Lines it was unsure about are marked. If the lines do not sum to the printed total, it tells you the difference rather than quietly accepting it.
You fix anything wrong, and confirm. This step is the whole reason the numbers downstream are worth looking at. An unreviewed receipt is not a purchase and is not counted anywhere — not in your spending, not in a price history, not in an average.
It is also where a duplicate is caught. Upload the same receipt twice and Basket recognises it and asks before saving a second copy.
- 4
Products get matched
Usually nothing to do
Each line is matched to a canonical product using the receipt spellings you have already linked. For most lines this is silent and automatic after the first few weeks.
New products, or a store that abbreviates differently, show up as unmatched lines for you to link. Linking one teaches Basket that spelling permanently.
- 5
It starts telling you things
From the first receipt, properly after a few months
A single receipt already gives you unit prices and a category breakdown. That is the part that works immediately.
Everything comparative needs history. Price trends need several purchases of the same thing. Shrinkflation needs a package size to have changed. A personal inflation index needs a baseline. Basket says it does not have enough data rather than showing you a number built on two observations.
Somewhere around the third month it stops being a filing system and starts being an argument with your own assumptions about where the money goes.
How much work is it, honestly
Under a minute per receipt, almost all of it the review step. If you shop twice a week that is about seven minutes a month.
The review cannot be removed without making everything downstream untrustworthy, so it has been made fast instead. Most receipts need a glance and a tap.