Chit reads every line of every receipt, so over time it builds up a record of what you bought, where, and at what price. From that it shows you how the price of the same item at the same shop changes, how your usual basket at a shop has moved, and what you spend each month. Nothing extra is stored for this: it’s all worked out from the receipts you’ve already saved.
Price trends for the same item
Pick something you buy regularly, such as a 4-pint bottle of whole milk, and Chit shows every time you bought it:
- a chart with one dot per purchase, with offer prices marked;
- a table of each purchase: date, shop, price and whether it was on offer;
- the most recent price of the same thing at other shops you’ve used.
Rises and falls are based on the regular price, so a one-off offer doesn’t look like a price cut. To make prices comparable, Chit works out the unit price: per kilogram for weighed items, per item for multibuys, and per litre or kilogram when the size is on the receipt, such as 4PT or 800G.
An item counts as “the same” when it’s from the same shop with the same text on the receipt. When comparing shops, Chit matches names loosely, leaving out shop names and own-brand words, but a different size, such as 2 pints instead of 4, is treated as a different item. The list shows anything you’ve bought at least twice.
Your own basket index for each shop
Official inflation figures are averages. Your basket index is about your own shopping. For each shop, Chit takes the things you’ve bought there more than once and compares each month’s regular price with the price when you first bought it. The average is shown as an index, where 100 means the prices you first paid. Below it, Chit lists the items whose prices have risen most.
The longer you use Chit, the more this tells you, since every receipt adds to it.
Monthly spending
For each month, Chit shows what you spent, broken down three ways:
- by week, to see when the money went;
- by category, such as fresh food, dairy, meat, drinks and household;
- by shop, which also leads to that shop’s basket index.
Categories are set from the receipt text, and you can change them when you check a receipt. Spending without a receipt, such as rent or a taxi, can be added by hand and counted in the same way.
Duplicate receipt warnings
When two flatmates both photograph the same receipt, or you save one twice, the same spending would be counted twice. If a receipt from the same shop, on the same day, with the same total already exists, Chit warns you while you’re checking the new one and lets you decide whether to carry on.
Photo management and PDF export
Chit keeps your receipts and photos until you decide otherwise; it never deletes them by itself. In the app’s photo manager you can:
- browse every receipt photo by month, and see how much space they take;
- open a photo at full size, or go to its receipt;
- delete a photo, which keeps the receipt and all its lines;
- export selected photos, or all of them, as a PDF with a section for each receipt, ready for an expense claim, an accountant or a backup.
Photos left over from a scan you didn’t finish are tidied away, so storage only holds what you’ve saved.
Related: see how Chit scans receipts, and how to split a receipt by item.