Bottle Deposits Aren't Spending, So RCT Tracks Them Separately

All three of RCT’s markets run a deposit-return scheme. The Netherlands has statiegeld on plastic bottles and cans, Germany has Pfand on both one-way and reusable containers, and Hungary has run its own deposit-return system on drinks packaging since 2024. If you buy drinks at all, a small amount of every shop is not really an expense. It’s a loan you made to the supermarket.

Most budgeting apps have no way to know that. The deposit is part of the total you paid, so it disappears into the total, and nothing ever records that you carried the bottles back and took the money. The refundable part is invisible from the moment it’s logged.

The receipt problem underneath it

Deposits are awkward for the same reason discounts are: they’re printed as their own lines, disconnected from the item they belong to. A six-pack of cans can appear as the pack on one line and the deposit on another, several lines further down, worded differently depending on the store and the country.

Because RCT reads receipts item by item rather than just grabbing the total, it can put those pieces back together. The deposit line gets attached to the item that caused it, which is what makes everything else possible: once a deposit is identifiably a deposit, it can be counted on its own instead of vanishing into a category total.

What “outstanding” actually means

The number RCT shows you is deliberately not a lifetime total of every deposit you’ve ever paid. A number that only ever counts upwards would be trivia.

Instead, it’s everything you’ve paid in deposits since your last return. That’s a real quantity about the physical world: roughly the money currently sitting in the crate by your door. When you finally haul the bag to the machine, you mark a return in RCT and the count starts again from zero.

This matters because the receipt itself can never tell RCT the money came back. A return is an event that happens days or weeks later, at a machine that doesn’t talk to your budgeting app. Marking it is the one small manual step, and it’s the step that keeps the number honest. If you tap it by mistake, a return can be removed again.

Where it turns up

• Its own insight screen, alongside the discount totals and store comparisons, so you can see what’s outstanding at any point.
• A notification when enough has built up to be worth a trip. It’s generated from your own scanned receipts, not a generic reminder, so it only fires when there’s actually something to collect.
• In your monthly totals, counted twice over on purpose. A deposit is still money that left your account this month, so it sits inside what you spent, and that’s what the shop genuinely cost you. It’s also totalled on its own, so you can see how much of that spending was refundable.

A return is not income

There’s a deliberate decision worth spelling out. When you mark a return, RCT does not add the money to your income for the month. It goes into a separate figure for money clawed back, alongside the discounts you caught.

The reasoning is that a discount is spending you avoided and a returned bottle is spending you undid. Neither is money you earned, and counting them as income would quietly inflate the one number that’s supposed to tell you whether the month worked: what you kept. Keeping them separate means the recovered figure can be satisfying without making the rest of your budget lie to you.

Why bother tracking it at all

Individually a deposit is small: a few cents, a few tens of forints. That’s exactly why nobody tracks it, and exactly why it adds up unnoticed. A household that buys drinks weekly can have a meaningful amount stranded in a corner of the kitchen at any given time, plus a spending history that has been quietly overstating one category all year.

RCT can do this for one reason: it already reads every line on your receipt. A budgeting app that only records the total has no path to it at all, because by the time the purchase is one number, the deposit is already indistinguishable from the drink.