Flux: thank you and goodbye

I’m sure now there’s good Monzo integration they’ll be able to rapidly attract new retailers

2 Likes

I love the concept it’s a shame that I don’t use any of the retailers they have on board though haha

Sad to hear you think that but it’s not the case! North is of interest and the national retailers we’re working on next will increase that coverage. For my own interest which 3 chains would you say you visit most frequently right now?

2 Likes

How would this work for e-mailed reciepts like say Amazon or Argos online? Would Flux be able to incorporate that?

Currently I have an Argos email which is classing as a receipt and I don’t like it. Clogging up my email :joy:

Lidl & Aldi would be a wonderful start.

6 Likes

The main chains I visit are supermarkets (primarily Co-op, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose). Having supermarkets on board would be great!

From a loyalty point of view, if you could do something with iZettle would be amazing. There are a lot of good independent coffee shops in Edinburgh, most use iZettle, and I would love to get rid of all the little stamp cards in my wallet.

7 Likes

Chuck Morrisons into that as well.

3 Likes

Don’t forget Northern Ireland. We often don’t have all the same retailers and if we do there might be 1 in Belfast. Asda and Boots would be my preferences. Would help with the Boots points

Watched the live stream last night and was very impressed, looking forward to one day being able to use it

5 Likes

What would be cool(I was talking to someone on the slack about it) was the automatic conversion of pdf receipts in inboxes into jpeg files for upload to the transaction as receipts.( Its is possible I used pdf2jpeg and James(the slack user) built a full on Apple shortcut which was super cool). That way you would have way more users and it would be company independent…
Further to this, you could run a PDF scraper to produce a text receipt.
(I’m off to do some research!)
As this is probably more useful to the general public as there are steam receipts,Airline tickets, confirmations, invoices the list is endless. All that would be great having in an App rather than having them on an email.
Also hypothetically what advantage does being part of Flux have for the company adopting the technology?

2 Likes

Yeah also from Northern Ireland (not a pret in site)

If I had a choice my top retailers would be:

  • Asda
  • Tesco
  • Boots
  • Subway
  • Nandos

Last 4 mainly because they have existing loyalty cards that mean i need to carry a stupid extra card

2 Likes

Most of my spending is Supermarkets and then the odd places like SkrewFix or ikea would be a good one

1 Like

Tesco and Costa for me please.

Oh and outside of London haha.

3 Likes

Nandos would be a great one.
Co-op with their membership would be good and would save me having to have the mini-card on my keys.

4 Likes

For me (I’m up in Newcastle):

Any big supermarket (Tesco / Asda / Sainsbury’s / Aldi)
Pret
Pets at Home

2 Likes

As I understand it, Flux has to integrate to the POS system itself, so PDF receipts from online retailers wouldn’t be something that Flux could handle.

That said, now that Monzo have exposed their receipts API, it’s possible there would be some way of scraping PDF documents, or email confirmations, and have that transformed into a “digital receipt” against the transaction within Monzo. The issue with such scraping activity is the requirement to have a static format for the data, because everyone will have their own format. Email receipts are normally in HTML so this would hypothetically be much simpler than extracting from a PDF as I understand it.

3 Likes

Though not as easy as it might at first seem; Richard Dingwall wrote an excellent post on this back in the mists of time, when our world was Mondo:

I’ve managed to get the receipt API to work.
I only just discovered that it was possible to scrape PDF so I might have a look at HTML scraping and seeing if I can get it to work (how much preprocessing is required in order to get a standard receipt)
Only because I’m curious as to if there’s a suitable/sensible solution to this problem.
@jzw95 that’s a very interesting post and makes a lot of sense

1 Like

If you get anything like this working (even partly), please post about it!

1 Like

I suspect there must be some simple data extraction possible, if only for the fact that email receipts from Amazon are shown differently in my Gmail app (i.e. a little header item preceding the actual email). Not sure if there’s additional metadata in the email header itself or if the email body is scraped by Google, though. Still, keep us updated if you successfully manage to link the two things, I’d be very interested in this.

2 Likes

I really loved that OCR example in the launch Livestream for photo’d receipts. I would probably use that.

3 Likes