9 hours ago
- Business
- Android Authority
I used a self-hosted app to track all my receipts and it's shockingly good
Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority
If you've ever tried to keep track of your receipts, you know how quickly it turns into a mess. Some are paper, some digital, and some are screenshots that you'll forget about in your phone's gallery. I've tried everything to get a handle on them. India-specific money management apps. Expensify. Google Sheets. I even built a little Notion template to manually track my receipts. And while each of them worked well enough for a while, they all broke down in the same few ways. Either they were too clunky to use daily, didn't play nice with different file types, were too complicated for family members to use, or locked useful features behind subscriptions I didn't want to pay for. But it wasn't until I tried a self-hosted tool called Receipt Wrangler that I found a system that finally made sense.
From Google Sheets to Expensify, nothing clicked till I tried out Receipt Wrangler.
I'll be honest. I wasn't expecting much when I stumbled upon the app's Github page. The description is minimal, the documentation isn't exactly welcoming, and there's no flashy pitch video or subscription model trying to upsell me. However, installing Receipt Wrangler isn't as complicated as it might look. The documentation might seem intimidating at first, but unlike many open-source projects, the developer has done a solid job detailing nearly every part of the installation process. I had it up and running using Docker on my Synology NAS within minutes.
A surprisingly powerful, fast, and frictionless workflow
Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority
First impressions are everything and Receipt Wrangler does a very convincing job right from the get go. Not only did it work, it worked better than most paid solutions I've tried. It's fast. It's flexible. And most importantly, it gives me a few very intuitive ways to manage my data. It hasn't just become my personal receipt tracker; I've set it up for my family, too. And that's the true litmus test for any self-hosted tool.
Receipt Wrangler puts the most obvious use cases front and center. You can set up a dashboard or even multiple dashboards with widgets showing amounts you owe to someone or are owed. You'll also see recent receipts right up front. Pretty straightforward. It's worth pointing out that Receipt Wrangler isn't the prettiest app around. There are no flashy graphics or onboarding tooltips. But after five minutes inside the dashboard, you don't miss any of that. Everything's where you expect it to be. Click a receipt, view the details, and start tagging or editing immediately. It's built around speed and clarity.
The UI might not be flashy, but Receipt Wrangler just gets out of my way and works.
The real magic, of course, is in how it handles receipt input. You can rename receipts, tag them, group them, and search. If a file has embedded text, the app indexes it. If it doesn't, you can manually input the data through one of the most frictionless forms I've used in a while. And this matters more than it sounds. Because it lets you build a consistent, searchable archive that doesn't depend on weird folder structures or convoluted filenames. That frictionless interface also plays a huge role in making the app stick.
Google Sheets, for all its flexibility, really started to show its limits when I put it through the same kind of workflow. A spreadsheet just isn't made for entering long lists of data on the go. I tried building linked folders and matching upload dates with bank transactions, but that approach fell apart fast. If I forgot to log something, it vanished into the ether. If I scanned a receipt but didn't rename it, I'd waste ten minutes later trying to remember what it was. Receipt Wrangler fixes that by putting everything in one place, with metadata you can actually use.
Elsewhere, tagging might sound like a basic feature, but it's become my favorite way to sort information across self-hosted tools, whether it's notes, photos, or receipts. It's what turned me from a casual user into someone who now relies on Receipt Wrangler full time. I started tagging receipts by store, category, and purpose. So when it's time to send invoices to the chartered accountant at the end of the month, I don't have to dig through emails or bank statements. I just filter by 'Office' and month, and everything is right there, even if the filename is nonsense. It's made filing monthly invoices almost boring, in a good way.
Receipt Wrangler's efficient tagging system is critical to sorting your pile of receipts.
Of course, Receipt Wrangler isn't the only tool with tagging support. But most other apps don't do it in a way that fits naturally in my workflow. Expensify, for example, lets you tag but is focused on reimbursements and team reporting. Shoeboxed forces you into their preset categories. Receipt Wrangler lets you make your own. Want to tag every invoice from your freelance gigs? It can do it. Want a tag for 'Reimbursed' and another for 'Pending'? That works too. You can sort out your archive of receipts however you want without working around a pre-defined system.
The little things that make it stick
Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority
I've always been skeptical of automatic OCR. Too many tools promise to extract all your data and then get half of it wrong. Receipt Wrangler plays it smart. If a file has embedded text, it pulls it. If not, you can hook it up to self-hosted AI models like Ollama or external ones like OpenAI or Gemini. Once configured with API keys, it can send receipts to these LLMs to interpret and complete tagging. I like the flexibility, and in a quick test, it worked pretty well. However, I'm not totally ready to send my financial data to an external AI. That said, I've been thinking about running an Ollama instance locally to handle it. But that's a project for another day.
Receipt Wrangler lets you connect to LLMs to automatically scan and tag your receipts.
The biggest advantage isn't just the features. Self-hosting the app is the biggest win when investing your time and energy into getting an app like Receipt Wrangler running. It's the fact that I own the whole thing, uptime pain-points included. The database lives on my server. Files don't get sent to someone else's cloud. I can back it up how I want, archive to cold storage, and trust that nothing disappears if a company shuts down or moves features behind a paywall.
That kind of control is rare now. Most tools try to lock you in, not help you out. Receipt Wrangler flips that. It feels like something built for people who actually care about owning their data or future-proofing their workflows instead of renting convenience. And if Receipt Wrangler ever stops development, I can just keep my instance running forever. That's obviously not an option with commercial tools.
There are a few more features here that sealed the deal for me. First, the way Receipt Wrangler handles backups. You can export everything easily, and since it's just a local app with a simple database, it's trivial to plug into any backup system. Second, it doesn't nag you. No emails. No reminders. No upgrade pitches. It just works, quietly. And third, maybe most importantly, it made me feel like I wasn't just getting better at tracking receipts, I was getting better at organizing my digital life. Instead of letting invoices pile up in a folder till the end of the month, the no-fuss interface makes it easy to file them right then and there. As someone who is notorious for procrastinating with paperwork, this is the system seller.
This is how receipt tracking should feel
Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority
I didn't expect to care this much about a tool for scanning receipts. But here we are. Receipt Wrangler turned a chore into something I actually enjoy. It gave me more control, more peace of mind, and fewer excuses to procrastinate. Compared to everything else I've tried — Google Sheets included — this is the first time I feel like I'll actually stick with a system. I'm not hoping that a free tier stays generous, I'm not bracing for a broken update, and most importantly, I'm not at the mercy of someone else's business model. All of that combined with the general excellence of the app has made it an integral part of my daily productivity workflow.
