The Birdy Is a Super Simple Budgeting Site That Records Your Purchases Via Email | Hacker News Reader

The Birdy Is a Super Simple Budgeting Site That Records Your Purchases Via Email

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24 pointscoreymaass10 comments

What I want is something that will parse and auto-categorize my Amazon purchases based on their emailed receipts, and somehow get that info into Mint.com. (Or another app that can replace Mint and also do this.)

Right now Mint does a decent job categorizing most of my other purchases based on vendor, but every month I end up with a huge, opaque line item for Amazon. Really hampers my budgeting.

(I have the same problem with Target and Wal-Mart, but to a lesser degree--they don't carry as wide a variety of stuff as Amazon, and I shop there less.)

I was coming here to post exactly this for small business...

Something that when I get an email receipt in gmail I can forward to my unique address (or filter in gmail).

I get Canada Post emails that are such a pain in the ass to do accounting for, but even something like monthly saas emails would be great to forward and it detect amount, taxes paid, category, etc. (and let me email to that address in the way this site does as well)

Here's at least two people who want it, who's going to build it? ;-)

It's actually being built. Check out http://onereceipt.com/ once they open.

Edit: sounds intriguing, especially if it doesn't require any kind of vendor support and I can forward it anything.

I would love to beta-test, if anyone's listening.

By "I can forward it anything", do you mean that you want to be able to train the app on new vendors? That would be awesome, but (1) hard to do right if that ordinary (read: Not HN reading) users could create their own filters or (2) impose difficult privacy problems if users forwarded their purchases to humans for parsing.

With respect to beta testing, according to http://blog.onereceipt.com/post/9256372304/hello-world, posted one week ago, they're going to start sending out invites to people who registered their interest 'within the next few weeks.'

If you want an early invite, they'll give you a referral email after you register.

> Invite at least 3 friends using the link below. The more friends you invite, the sooner you'll get access!

I saw that -- but although beggars can't be choosers, as a rule I don't spam my friends with invitations to try products I haven't been able to try yet myself.

Me either, which is why I didn't include a referral link in my comment above.

Hey pinko, I am one of the co-founders at OneReceipt. We are beginning to send out invites for the private beta. Looking forward to your feedback.

These guys have nice Yahoo! Mail App for scanning your inbox automatically and aggregating purchase history:

https://www.projectslice.com/mail_app

Full disclosure: I work for Yahoo! and supported them building this on the Yahoo! Mail app platform.

Zawinski's law of software envelopment at it again..

"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

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