Tidy Receipts has always run entirely in your browser. This week it goes two steps further: you can install it like a native app, and once you have used it once, it works with no internet connection at all.
Install it on your desktop or phone
On a desktop, open tidyreceipts.app in Chrome or Edge and click the install icon at the right-hand end of the address bar (or use the browser menu and choose “Install Tidy Receipts”). On macOS Safari, use the File menu, then “Add to Dock”.
On an iPhone, open the site in Safari, tap Share, then “Add to Home Screen”, and turn on “Open as Web App” so it launches in its own window. On Android, Chrome will offer “Add to Home screen” or “Install app”.
Either way you get a real app icon and a clean, full-screen window with no browser chrome.
Works on a plane, on the Tube, anywhere
The first time you process a receipt while online, your device quietly caches the image-processing and OCR tools. After that the app works with no connection: open it in the departure lounge, on the Underground, or anywhere your signal drops, and it behaves exactly as it does online.
One tip: do that first run while connected, and on an iPhone do it inside the installed app, because an installed web app keeps its own separate storage from the browser tab.
The privacy story is now airtight
This is the part we are most pleased about. Until recently, even though your receipts never left your device, your browser still fetched the heavy libraries (the computer-vision and OCR engines) from third-party content networks. Those networks could see your IP address and the fact that you were using the tool.
Not any more. We now host every one of those libraries ourselves, on the same origin as the site. Loading and using Tidy Receipts makes zero requests to any third party. “Nothing leaves your device” is now true in the strongest sense: not your receipts, and not even a trace of your visit.
It made the tool sturdier, too. A content network can no longer change a file underneath us, or take the site down by retiring an old version, which, candidly, is a failure we had just lived through.
Try it
Install it, process one receipt while connected, then switch off your wifi and watch it carry on. And if you have not seen the new output yet, your receipts now come out as a proper ledger.