Today was another good day for writing code. I finally built that quick-feedback receipt item tracker I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’d built a simpler version into Quantified Awesome (not linked from the main interface, since it was very rough), but I found the browser roundtrip too disruptive. Today’s implementation uses Angular for faster responses. For good measure, I’ve got a NodeJS server proxying the requests to either my local development copy of Quantified Awesome or to my production version.

Here’s a screenshot:

On the left side, I have a scanned receipt in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro (or a paper receipt on the side). On the right, my autocompleting tracking interface. It’s not pretty, but it fits what I have in my head. I like the way that typing in the first few characters of the receipt line item is often enough to uniquely identify the receipt item type and retrieve the price history. This means that as I track, I also get a sense of the price trends and what a good sale is.

Aside from keeping track of the prices, I’m also looking forward to analyzing our consumption by category on a more regular basis. I did a few analyses along those lines before (here’s a year of data), but it might be neat to have that kind of feedback on a daily basis. Entering my receipt archive was easy. I ended up typing in the receipts from here to January because it was fun. =)

Next up: fast categorization, some graphing… I’m also looking forward to making a quick price book interface. Hmm, if I dust off that grocery list tool I had started building into Quantified Aweome and I integrate the price book, that might be handy.