Type What You Bought and RCT Turns It Into an Itemized Receipt
RCT can build a receipt out of a sentence. Enter the total you paid and type what you bought in plain language, and RCT splits it into individual items, prices them so they add up to your total exactly, and sorts each one into a category, the same result a scan produces, without a receipt.
Item-level tracking has an obvious weak point: it needs a receipt. Cash purchases, a paper receipt you threw away, an Apple Pay charge you paid at a bar, a lunch you split with three people. Logging those manually usually means one entry, one category, one number, exactly the undifferentiated lump that RCT exists to avoid.
The “Add without scanning” screen closes that gap. You type the total, then describe the purchase the way you’d describe it to a friend: two flat whites, a croissant and a chicken sandwich. RCT turns that into a real itemized receipt, prices each line, categorizes each line, and shows you the same review screen a scan would.
Rough prices are fine, because the total is the anchor
You can include prices if you remember them, and skip them if you don’t. What makes this work is that the total you paid is known and treated as authoritative: the item prices are fitted to add up to it exactly. So an estimate that’s a little off on the coffee gets absorbed rather than leaving your books wrong by €0.40. This is the opposite of guessing at a total from a list of guesses.
It runs through the same pipeline as a scan
The text doesn’t take a shortcut. Once the items exist, they go through the identical categorization the scanner uses, land in the same review screen where you can rename an item, change its category, or fix a price, and get saved as a multi-item receipt rather than a single manual entry. Category limits, reports, trends, and per-category totals all treat it exactly like a scanned receipt, because structurally it is one.
Where it shows up
Three places, all for the same reason, you have a total but no receipt:
- Manual entry. If you’re already typing an expense in by hand and it was more than one thing, “Bought several things? List them” opens the text screen instead.
- Quick Save. The Apple Pay shortcut flow already knows the amount and the merchant, so “List what you bought” only needs the items.
- Pending Apple Pay transactions. A charge sitting in your pending list can be described instead of scanned. Saving it clears the pending transaction the same way scanning a receipt for it would.
In the last two cases the total, currency, merchant, and date are already filled in from the transaction, so all you actually type is what you bought.
Why this matters more than it sounds
Every budgeting app lets you add an expense manually. The problem was never the typing, it was that manual entries are structurally poorer than scanned ones: one category for a purchase that was really four things. Describing the purchase in a sentence gets you the item-level detail back for the spending that has no receipt attached, which in most people’s month is a surprisingly large share of it.