back with a really long receipt from Walmart. I want to take that receipt, visit
walmart.com, type in the barcode numbers and have it bring up a detailed,
downloadable inventory of things I bought in that particular purchase. It would
be great if I could get a CSV file something like this:
Name,SKU,Category,Quantity,Price,Total
"Great Value Whole Milk",12345,Dairy,4,2.30,9.20
"Oreo Double Stuff Cookies",87443,Dessert,1,3.25,3.25
...
Here are some reasons I want that feature:
- Improved grocery budgeting. How much money do we spend on dairy foods?
- Tracking price changes. Is the $30 cleaning supplies budget still reasonable or has Comet been increasing in price lately?
- For business expenditures, I could write a program to automatically create ledger entries in QuickBooks categorized into the appropriate accounts.
- Things I haven't thought of yet
A CSV file couldn't quite capture all the data that's present in a typical receipt, so maybe some other format would be better suited to the task. The format isn't as
important as that I can have access to the data.
4 comments:
That is a really good idea. I wonder if any retailers provide downloadable versions of the receipts? I haven't heard of any but it would be nice to use.
That would be a great idea. I never look at receipts anymore after I go grocery shopping because I always see a bunch of short hand abbreviations for things I don't understand. It would be great to visit Walmart.com and have the option to see visuals on the items I bought a month ago.
Brilliant.
From what I've heard, when buying from the Apple retail stores, they give you the option of taking a paper receipt or emailing the receipt to you. That's the closest I've heard of anybody providing downloadable receipts.
I was just thinking about the same thing. It would be nice for expenses tracking. At the minimun it would good if they categorize the items in your receipts based on standard categories that are used for budgetting. That'd be a hit.
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