In June we visited fourteen people while they filed a real month of receipts. Nine sessions were at kitchen tables in Lisbon and Porto, five were over video with people in Rotterdam and Faro, and each ran 40–70 minutes. Nobody was given a task list; we asked people to do the filing that was already waiting. Three people declined to show us their medical receipts, which we should have planned for and had not.
Nobody is sitting down when the photo is taken
Capture happens standing at a till, in a car park, or on a bus, one-handed, with a bag on the other arm. The shutter sat near the top of the screen, which is fine on a desk and impossible with a thumb. It moved to the bottom third, and holding it now keeps the camera open for the next receipt instead of pushing a review sheet up after every shot. In the two weeks after that change, the median number of receipts per capture session went from 1 to 3.
The shoebox is a filing system
One person in Porto has kept receipts in a biscuit tin since 2011 and empties it on the last Sunday of the month, radio on, about forty minutes of work. That is not disorganisation, it is batching, and our daily reminder had been arguing with it for a year. Another participant, a freelance translator, works to an accountant’s deadline on the 20th and needs the previous month complete and in one file. Both patterns are monthly. We had built for a daily habit that nobody in the room had.
I don’t want to hear about my money on a Tuesday morning. I want it all in one place on the Sunday I sit down for it.
People search for shops
In the two weeks before the visits the web app took 2,140 searches. Of those, 71% were merchant names or fragments of them, often misspelled or written without accents, and 9% used a category filter. Nobody in the fourteen sessions touched the date range picker; everyone scrolled instead. Merchant search now takes the first field on the page and matches without accents, so “farmacia” finds Farmácia Estrela on the first keystroke that matters.
Export is the whole product for some people
Six of the fourteen open the web app only to export, and one sends a CSV named “agosto.csv” to an accountant on the 20th of every month. So the export got fixed rather than expanded: one row per receipt with the merchant string exactly as printed, a separate file for line detail, and a column order that does not change between releases, so a spreadsheet template survives the year. Slip does not connect to accounting software and we have no plan to this year. A file that opens anywhere is doing more for those six than an integration would.