Why a scanned receipt stays a draft
EvenHearth reads your receipts for you, and nothing it reads counts until a person has checked it.
Most of our Saturday mornings with the spreadsheet went to one job: reading receipts. The store, the date, every line, which lines were shared, the tax, the total. Then typing it all in and checking the arithmetic.
So the obvious thing for EvenHearth to do is read the receipt for you, and it does. Photograph a receipt and it pulls out the merchant, the date, the currency, every line, the subtotal, the taxes, any discounts and fees, and the total.
What it reads is a draft until you’ve looked at it.
Why it asks
Reading receipts goes wrong sometimes. Totals get misread, lines get missed, a faded date gets guessed. On a grocery receipt that’s an annoyance. In a shared ledger it’s worse, because a wrong number doesn’t stay where it landed. It moves into what two people owe each other, and nobody notices until the month doesn’t add up.
So nothing EvenHearth reads counts until a person has looked at it. What it read is a draft. You can fix any figure, add a line it missed, remove one that doesn’t belong, merge two that are the same thing, split one that’s really two, or skip the lines and keep only the total. When it looks right you confirm it, and only then does it become part of the household’s record.
The month won’t close around a draft
EvenHearth won’t close a month while a draft is still waiting. Closing over a half-checked receipt would leave out money the household thinks it has already recorded, and the settlement would be wrong in a way that’s hard to see.
If a receipt can’t be read at all, you can try again or type it in yourself.
Why it’s still faster
Checking one draft while the receipt is in your hand takes a moment. Typing a stack of receipts three weeks later took us a Saturday morning.