#STIL.RECEIPT
6 posts- 3 min
I built it for my own taxes — Darkroom Notes, Season 4, and STIL.RECEIPT
Every year at tax time, I'd wrestle with the pile of receipts stuffed in drawers and my wallet. Date, amount, store, tax rate — type each one in by hand, or leave them and cry about it later. The person it troubled most was me. Darkroom Notes, Season 4: my receipt app, STIL.RECEIPT, starting with why I made it.
- 2 min
Every real bug becomes a test — one receipt stands guard
A discount line vanishes entirely. A payment made with iD gets recorded as cash. With something as endlessly varied as receipts, fixing one may be breaking another. So I decided to turn every receipt that tripped me up on a real device into a test, on the spot. The story of how the receipt that troubled me becomes a guard.
- 3 min
Harder to read than a card — a table splits into two lines
A receipt's line items run name on the left, amount on the right. To the human eye, it's clearly one row. But text recognition sometimes returned that name and amount as separate fragments. What looked like one row split into two — and that "table" was the part of this app I struggled with most.
- 3 min
When a receipt becomes an expense — a fourth tool, and the end of Darkroom Notes Season 4
Capture, read, sort, verify, turn into an expense. The pieces I've written one by one come together on a single receipt. To close, I trace that flow from start to finish, write what I came to think after building a fourth tool, and end Darkroom Notes Season 4.
- 2 min
The total never lies — fixing tax mix-ups with math
The "10% taxable" field would end up holding the tax amount instead of the taxable amount. AI and rules alike mix it up when similar numbers sit nearby. And worse, the wrong number really does exist somewhere on the receipt. What rescued it wasn't a clever reader, but one unmoving fact — the total.
- 3 min
The word I won't write — wording around tax
"Fully compliant with the invoice system." "Fully compliant with the recordkeeping law." Written in one line, it would probably be strong. Clear, eye-catching. But I didn't write it. Tax is law, and I'm someone who builds apps, not a tax accountant. Holding back the convenient one-liner — a story about wording.