Latest news with #receipts
South China Morning Post
29-06-2025
- Business
- South China Morning Post
Meet Chloe and Claire Lee, the sisters behind the Selleb app – they share almost everything, including their wardrobe and Instagram account, and they're friendly with Steve Jobs' daughter, Eve
Want to recommend a product? Be sure to show your receipt. Chloe Lee and her sister Claire Lee think receipts offer a deep insight into our habits and lifestyle, and wanted a place where they could see what cool and influential people were buying. This was the main inspiration behind their invite-only app Selleb, a product discovery platform that uses receipts to connect users with similar taste profiles. Chloe Lee, second right, recently joined Eve Jobs, right, for a weekend with friends. Photo: @evejobs/Instagram The app allows users to share their spending – from big purchases to groceries and coffee – and provide real recommendations to fellow consumers. Users can discover candid reviews from others and find options for their next splurge without being bothered by paid ads or fake ratings. Advertisement The Selleb sisters Chloe Lee and Claire Lee have built a successful, invite-only app together. Photo: @claireleeyours/Instagram Already moving in the right circles – Claire was recently spotted on a girls' trip with Steve Jobs' daughter Eve – the pair are obviously on the up and up. So what else do we know about them? They started out selling second-hand items Chloe Lee in a recent Instagram post, wearing a little black dress with an oversized grey coat and a black bag. Photo: @cachetdechloe/Instagram In middle and high school, Chloe and Claire sold second-hand items on Poshmark, an online marketplace for clothes and accessories. According to an interview with Andover, the sisters' secondary school, their first sale was a Victoria's Secret phone case. From there, they expanded their sales to include pieces from their wardrobes and items that they had hand-picked at thrift stores. An important moment for them was when they found a Roberto Cavalli blouse for 69 cents and resold it for US$250. Amassing a following of over 650,000 on Poshmark and gaining attention as successful fashion bloggers, the pair eventually collaborated with brands such as Revolve, Urban Outfitters and Le Labo. Selleb was originally a newsletter
New York Times
24-06-2025
- Health
- New York Times
I've Heard Receipts Are Toxic. Is It Safe to Touch Them?
Q: I've seen claims online that paper receipts contain toxic chemicals. Should I avoid touching them? In a video on TikTok, Dr. Tania Elliot, a social media influencer with a medical background, grasps a Whole Foods receipt with a large pair of wooden tongs. 'Don't touch this,' she says, explaining that most paper receipts contain a 'toxic' chemical called bisphenol A, or BPA, which is easily absorbed through the skin and linked to health issues like infertility, hormone imbalances and certain cancers. Such claims are made all over the internet. And many of them are not totally wrong, experts say. Until recently, most paper receipts in the United States did contain BPA, a known hormone disruptor, and skin exposures have been linked to fertility issues, insulin resistance and more. But over the past decade, BPA has largely been phased out and replaced with a different chemical, bisphenol S, or BPS. We know much less about BPS, such as how it might affect the body and what exposure levels may be safe, said Nancy Hopf, an industrial toxicologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. The risk associated with handling paper receipts quite likely depends on many factors, including how often and for how long you touch them. Here's what we know. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Android Authority
08-06-2025
- 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.
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The 1 Thing You Should Always Do After Signing A Restaurant Receipt
If you have ever dined out, you know the drill. After your delicious drink or meal, you're likely going to get two receipts of your bill from your server: a merchant and a customer copy. Sometimes, a merchant copy will be the only receipt with a line for a signature, but often there is no distinct difference in the agreements between the two versions. So what happens if you accidentally sign the customer copy instead of the restaurant copy? Restaurant workers and fraud experts weighed in. Alicia Perry, a San Diego-based beverage director, said it can depend on the exact policies of the restaurant or establishment, from what she's experienced in the industry. 'It's not something that we traditionally worry about or are concerned about, just as long as there's a signed copy,' she said. 'So that way, we can ensure that whoever chooses or hopes to dispute it, that they've essentially signed whatever they have marked on that side of the receipt.' Gabriella Zottola, a Waltham, Massachusetts-based restaurant manager, agreed and said that leaving behind a signed customer copy is not a big deal. 'As long as the tip is clearly written on it, we're good!' she said. Zottola noted that if a customer copy is left behind, her practice is to 'toss them.' Perry echoed this sentiment, saying, 'If the guest isn't there, then we just throw [the customer copy] away to make sure that it's not tampered with.' As technology makes paper receipts increasingly obsolete, consider that this is less of an issue nowadays. Perry said that whether or not you sign the merchant copy is 'largely a moot point because of digital payments like Toast; however, it's totally fine to sign the customer copy. Nothing will happen.' Bill Whitlow, a Covington, Kentucky-based restaurant operator, said that a bigger issue is when a customer signs the merchant copy and then accidentally takes it home, so that all that is left behind is a blank customer copy. The restaurants are then left to figure out what the tip was meant to be. In these scenarios, what happens next depends on the restaurant's policy. Whitlow said in the restaurants he was raised in, staffers would work off of the indentation of the tip left behind if it was clearly visible. 'Ninety-nine percent of the time the copies are on top of each other. So you could clearly see the [indentation] of what they wrote on the other stack. And you'd go with that,' he said. But in some cases, restaurant staffers can be left with no tip at all if it's not written down on a receipt. Whitlow recalled that when he worked at a restaurant in Miami's South Beach, if the customer 'had taken the wrong copy, I wasn't going to get tipped on [a] South Beach $200-$300 check ... I definitely ran a few people down.' For Perry, the signature is key. She said that if a patron fills out a tip for a guest copy of the receipt, but then doesn't sign it, it can leave some staffers in restaurants out of a tip. In some places she's worked at, 'I wouldn't be able to enter that information,' she said. 'I can't really process a tip. Of course, I can process payment.' Even though it may not matter for getting charged, you should still take home customer copies of receipts. Amy Nofziger, director of victim support at AARP Fraud Watch Network, said that in general, for any clothing, grocery store or restaurant purchase, it's a good practice to keep your receipts until the charge processes on your credit card. That way, you can validate 'that what you think you were charged is what was actually charged to your credit card. And then once you see that it is matching up, then you can dispose of that receipt,' she said. Nofziger recalled how having the customer copy of a bill has helped her dispute an incorrect tip amount. Without the customer copy, you can dispute the incorrect charge, 'but again, having that copy, I think is just more proof,' she said. Nofziger also recommends knowing your last few credit card numbers, so that you can quickly notice if information is not lining up. 'We need to get into the habit of looking to see where our personal information is,' she said. 'If you do look at a receipt, there usually will be the last four digits of your credit card number and then everything else is etched out.' Whitlow said that if you do see a discrepancy, you should try calling the restaurant first to get it fixed, because it can be costly for restaurants. 'If you see something wrong on your credit card statement ... it's probably just a legitimate mistake,' he advised. 'We've had a problem where like someone would say had a $100 check, and they put a $25 tip, and somebody accidentally put that as a $35 tip.' 'And instead of calling the restaurant to have it fixed ... they dispute it,' he continued. Whitlow said that this can result in having the bank charge back the entire amount, along with a fee, instead of just the tip amount. 'The restaurant loses the tip that they already gave the server, the whole check, and also has to pay us like a $35 fee for a chargeback,' he said. And if you want to be a good customer, check your math, restaurant workers advised. Whitlow said that it's a common mistake for the tip amount to not match up with the total amount. In these cases, he's been taught to go with what's on the tip line, because, 'People will write what they want, you can't always expect them to do proper math.' Zottola agreed and said in these scenarios, 'We end up doing the math for them and still putting in the correct total from the tip they write.' But Perry said that it can sometimes be a 'null and void situation' when the tip amount does not line up with the final amount, 'because we can't assume that the individual is wanting to pay one or the other, especially if they don't add up.' In other words, what you do and don't write and sign at the bottom of receipts really does matter. That extra diligence of writing legibly and double-checking your math may take you a few more minutes, but it can save you ― and restaurant staffers ― great peace of mind. Is It Selfish To Make An Elaborate Coffee Drink Order? 7 Things I Won't Do After Working As A Restaurant Host Here's What You Should Be Tipping On Food Delivery Apps During Extreme Weather
Bloomberg
06-05-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Britain's Green Taxes Fall to the Lowest Level on Record
The UK government is collecting less money from green taxes than at any point since records began 28 years ago, according to the Office for National Statistics. Environmental levies raised £54.3 billion ($73 billion) last year, down 0.5% from £54.6 billion in 2023, as fuel duty was frozen once again and receipts from the Emissions Trading Regime and the Climate Change Levy declined.
