Pro Feature

Receipt Photos

Some purchases need more than a number. A warranty, an expense claim, a return window, a bill you will want to check against next month's — for those, the receipt itself is the record. Pocket Clear lets you photograph a receipt and attach it to the transaction, so the paper can go in the bin on the way out of the shop.

Attaching a receipt

On the Add Transaction or Edit Transaction screen you will find a Receipt section with two options: Take photo opens your camera, and Choose photo picks one you have already taken. Either way the photo is attached to that one transaction, and you can replace or remove it at any time by opening the transaction again.

In your transaction list, a small paperclip next to a transaction means it has a receipt attached.

It saves straight away, even with no signal

Receipts get photographed at the till, which is very often exactly where the signal is worst. So Pocket Clear never makes you wait: the photo is saved to your phone and the transaction is recorded immediately, and the backup happens quietly afterwards whenever there is a connection. Until it has been backed up you will see a small upload icon instead of the paperclip. That is not an error and there is nothing to do about it — the next time your phone has signal, it finishes on its own.

Photos are shrunk before they are backed up, so a receipt uses a small fraction of the data a full-size camera photo would.

Who can see your receipts

Nobody but you. Receipts are stored in a private location that is not readable from the internet — there is no public link to a receipt, and there is no address anyone could guess or stumble across. When you open one, Pocket Clear checks that you are signed in and that the receipt is yours, and then issues a temporary link that stops working after a few minutes.

This matters more than it might sound. 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. So receipts are treated as some of the most sensitive data in the app.

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

Turning it on and off

Receipt Photos is a Pro feature and is on by default. Go to Settings › Receipt Photos to turn it off; the Receipt section disappears from the Add and Edit screens and nothing else changes.

Because the photos need somewhere to live, the feature only appears when Cloud Sync is on. A receipt is written to your phone first so the transaction saves instantly even with no signal, and once it has uploaded the phone's copy is removed — keeping every photo twice would fill your storage for no benefit. From then on the app fetches it from your private cloud storage when you open the transaction.

This means turning Cloud Sync off permanently deletes your receipt photos. Pocket Clear tells you how many are about to go and asks you to confirm, but there is no undo and no copy left on the phone. Everything else — transactions, categories, budgets — is unaffected and stays on your device as always. If you are offline, the app says so and the photo reappears once you are back on Wi-Fi or mobile data.

If you delete your Pocket Clear account, both copies go: the backups are deleted along with everything else on our servers, and the app's data is removed from your device.