Receipt Photos: Attach the Paper, Find It Eight Months Later

Most of the time, a number is enough. You spent £6.40 at the coffee place; the number is the whole story and the paper goes in the bin.

Then there are the ones where the number is not enough. The kettle with a two-year warranty. The client lunch you will have to claim back in March. The jacket inside a thirty-day return window. The bill you want to hold up against next month's when you are certain they have charged you twice.

For those, the receipt itself is the record — and the receipt is a piece of paper that lives in a coat pocket until it goes through the wash. Pocket Clear now lets you photograph it and attach it to the transaction, so the paper can go in the bin on the way out of the shop.

The honest bit first: this is not OCR

Let me get the disappointment out of the way in the second section rather than the last one.

Pocket Clear does not read your receipt. It does not pull the total off it, it does not detect the merchant, it does not guess the category, and it does not fill in a single field for you. You type the transaction the way you always have and the photo is attached to it. That is the entire feature: attach, and find it later.

This was a choice, so here is the reasoning. Receipt scanning that works is genuinely useful. Receipt scanning that is 85% right is worse than nothing, because you have to check every field it filled in — and checking a field somebody else filled in is slower and more error-prone than typing it yourself. You end up with a workflow where the app is confidently wrong about the amount on a crumpled thermal receipt, and you either catch it, in which case you did the work twice, or you do not, in which case your records are wrong and you have no idea.

There is also a second cost that gets skipped in the marketing. Reading a receipt means processing an image of it, and an image of a receipt is a fairly rich document — merchant, address, time, card digits, sometimes a clear picture of something you would rather not broadcast. Pocket Clear stores your photo. It does not analyse it, and no third-party service sees it.

If we ever do this, it will be because it works well enough that you can stop checking. Until then, the feature that is actually useful — being able to find the receipt for that transaction, eight months later, in four seconds — is the one that shipped.

Attaching one

On the Add Transaction or Edit Transaction screen there is a Receipt section with two options. Take photo opens the camera. Choose photo picks one you already took. Either way the photo attaches to that one transaction, and you can replace or remove it later by opening the transaction again.

In your transaction list, a small paperclip next to a row means it has a receipt. That is the whole discovery mechanism, and it is deliberately boring: you find receipts by finding the transaction, which you already know how to do — including through search and payees and every filter on All Transactions.

It saves straight away, even with no signal

This is the part that took the most care, and it is the part you will never notice if it is done right.

Receipts get photographed at the till. The till is very often exactly where the signal is worst — the back of a supermarket, an underground food court, a shop in a country where your roaming has given up. An app that makes you wait for an upload before it will save your transaction is an app that fails at the precise moment you are trying to use it, in front of a queue.

So Pocket Clear never waits. The photo is written to your phone and the transaction is saved immediately. The upload happens quietly afterwards, whenever there is a connection. Until it has been backed up you see a small upload icon in place of the paperclip — that is not an error and there is nothing for you to do about it. Next time the phone has signal, it finishes on its own.

The copy on your phone is the real one. The backup is what protects you if the phone goes in a canal.

Photos are also shrunk before they are backed up, so a receipt costs a small fraction of the data a full-size camera photo would. A month of receipts on a metered connection abroad should not be something you have to think about.

Where the photos live

A receipt can carry your name, a shop address, the last four digits of your card, and — for a pharmacy or a clinic — a fairly clear picture of something private. That puts receipts among the most sensitive things in the app, and they are handled accordingly.

Backed-up receipts sit in private storage that is not readable from the internet. There is no public URL for a receipt. There is no address that could be guessed, shared by accident, indexed, or stumbled across. When you open one, Pocket Clear checks that you are signed in and that the receipt is yours, and only then issues a temporary link that stops working after a few minutes.

Short-lived signed links matter more than they sound. The common way image storage leaks is not a break-in; it is a permanent URL that ends up somewhere it should not — in a log, in a shared screenshot, in a browser history on a borrowed laptop. A link that has already expired cannot leak anything.

Receipts are also not shared in Partner Mode. If you are linked with a partner they see the transaction, as they always have. They do not see the photo attached to it.

Turning it on, turning it off, and what happens then

Receipt Photos is a Pro feature and it is on by default. Settings › Receipt Photos turns it off, which removes the Receipt section from the Add and Edit screens and changes nothing else.

Because backups need somewhere to go, the feature only appears when Cloud Sync is on. On the free tier Pocket Clear never uploads anything at all, so there is no cloud side to put a photo in.

If you turn Cloud Sync off, Pocket Clear tells you — with a number, not a vague warning — exactly how many receipt photos it is about to delete, and that the deletion is permanent. "Your 47 receipt photos are stored only in the cloud. Turning off Cloud Sync deletes them permanently. This cannot be undone." That is the sentence, and it is deliberately a count rather than a shrug, because "some data may be removed" is how people end up losing things they cared about.

The photo goes to your phone first, so the transaction saves the instant you tap Save even with no signal at the till. Once it has uploaded, the phone's copy is removed and the app fetches it from your private cloud storage when you open the transaction — storing every receipt twice would eat your device storage for nothing. Everything else in Pocket Clear stays local-first exactly as before; receipts are the one thing that lives in the cloud, which is why turning sync off takes them with it.

Deleting your Pocket Clear account removes both copies: the backups go with everything else on our servers, and the app's data is removed from your device.

What it is for

Not every transaction needs a photo, and attaching one to your morning coffee is a waste of your time and your phone's storage. The ones worth photographing are the ones with a future: warranties, expense claims, return windows, anything you might have to prove. Perhaps one in twenty.

The value is not in the photographing. It is eight months later, when the kettle dies inside its warranty and the shop wants proof of purchase, and instead of turning out a drawer you open the transaction and it is there — filed, by definition, under exactly the right date and amount, because it was attached to the record of the money leaving.

The full walkthrough is in the help centre: Receipt Photos.