Allow QMac to OCR a Receipt for Splits

nomadintrovert

I know that there is the mobile app (that I'm still learning), but I predominately use Quicken from my MacBook Air. When I receive a receipt that itemizes purchases (I.E. a grocery store), it would be handy if MacOS detected a receipt within the Photos app, offered to OCR it, detect purchased items as they are shown, pull them into a transaction on the register, and add each item and its price to the split. I realize that something like "Speed Stick Deodorant" will likely show up as SPEED STICK because of how the retailer codes it, but I can go through and clean it up.

Additionally, I could see a use case for the Photos app to connect to our QMac accounts to allow direct importing and possibly matching a receipt to a transaction (maybe useful for the future Apple Intelligence?).

jacobs

if MacOS detected a receipt within the Photos app, offered to OCR it, detect purchased items as they are shown, pull them into a transaction on the register, and add each item and its price to the split.

Wow, there's a lot to unpack in that request! 😁

The first problem is that the first half of your feature request is out of Quicken's hands and would require Apple to build such capabilities into macOS. Auto-detection of a receipt, followed by turning it into text seems unlikely to me, but it's not out of the potential of current technologies. But without such functionality, including an API for third-party applications to import the data, there's nothing Quicken can do to implement such a feature request.

Second, Quicken typically won't add features like this which can't be replicated on the opposite platform. So it might require a similar set of tools in Windows for Quicken management to decide to green light development of such a feature.

Third, making each item on a receipt into a split seems like big can of worms. What happens if I scan a grocery receipt with 50 items; surely no one would want to categorize each item purchased. Even a smaller purchase from Target or Home Depot night have multiple items which all could be lumped together and categorized in one split, but here Quicken would split and categorize each one.

Fourth, trying to understand the items on a receipt seems very hit or miss, depending on the retailer and their system. I know I often look at a receipt from Lowe's or CVS and sit scratching my head (and/or asking my wife) to figure out what the actual items are. And you'd probably want Quicken to auto-categorize them items, and that's way beyond what the current Rauto-cateorizaiton system can do.

FIth, there's the surprisingly complex issue of sales tax. In Quicken, most users probably want sales tax added to each split line (e.g. on my Lowe's receipt, add sales tax to the cost of the bags of mulch on line 5). But some users who are in a tax situation where they can itemize sales tax for a deduction would want sales tax shown on its own split line using a category for tracking sales tax. For the majority of users who want sales tax bundled with the cost of the items purchased, there's then the problem of taxable and non-taxable items, and expecting Quicken to parse that in all the different ways it could appear on a receipt seems highly unlikely to me.

So… while I understand the request, and it could be cool if a lot of intelligence could be built in with various options offered to users, it just seems very far-fetched to me. And there are so many other pressing areas of need in Quicken Mac in budgeting, investments, reports, and planning tools that I personally think should be higher priorities for the developers.

nomadintrovert

I appreciate the detailed reply and you are right in that if they're going to develop it for one operating system, they'll want to do it for the other.