As many will know Monzo has recently partnered with Flux (See your receipts in Monzo with Flux) in order to automatically see receipts for certain merchants within your Monzo app. I think it’s a great idea and I’m looking forward to where it goes, but at this moment in time it misses out because it only accounts for a super minority of transactions (I don’t live in London )
Last night I thought I’d throw together a little project which uses Gmail APIs to fetch the latest 50 emails, go through them and scrape known receipt formats, and then publish them onto Monzo transactions! I shared this on Twitter:
Actually got a lot of really good feedback especially about privacy etc - In my eyes though this was more about the result of how it looked in the app rather than the journey and the exact solution I used. Jonas retweeted it yesterday explaining how he sees in a few years that this will be the standard (and I for one can’t wait)
It actually got me thinking though as @johncoles mentioned about forwarding the email manually to Monzo and then a similar matcher system took over. This helps with some of the privacy concerns as they don’t have access to all your emails!
Would love to see what other ideas people have about this, and would you trust/use a system like that or are you thinking “oh hell no”?
I’m interested in where this will go. Digital receipts look great in the app, and I’m excited for it to work for ~80% of transactions (great if it can be all of them!).
The flux partnership is a great start, and the receipts API is good but what stores will take the time to build upon it, that is my worry.
100% agree, especially seeing some of the mockups created in the Q+A with itineraries and more! Going to be super powerful!
This is a worry I share and where I think approaching the problem from different angles is best.
Primarily digital merchants (such as the ones I shared above) shouldn’t be too difficult as they will have APIs and mechanisms if Monzo were to work with them but it’s a lot more effort.
Emails are easier in ways because it has a lot more information about a lot of clients, but can be harder to match, less seamless and possibly not as reliable.
Stores are definitely where it can get more interesting, I think when (I don’t see it as an if) supermarkets get onboard it will really change the scene. It’s just going to be a challenge of where the integration lies, only time will see.
Honestly I think its gunna take one absolutely major retailer to push flux. Get an Asda or a Tesco onboard and watch it spiral.
As for the privacy side of things I dont like the idea of giving full access to my mails because thats a vital part of my online identify and contains alotttt of sensitive stuff in there.
This is an excellent first step… look how monzo has grown in the last year and it excites me where this front could be in even just a years time
This is the way I pictured receipts in Monzo going. Love it.
As you say, it’s been suggested before, but ideally we could just forward any receipt emails to our own special email address at monzo and they’d have a process that would do the same kind of thing to match the receipt against the transaction and suitably enrich it. This would be amazeballs IMO!
I played with time when I was trying to improve merchant data locating but I discovered you need to input massive amounts of leeway into it as the difference between Merchant transaction time and an actual transaction but I would be interested to know what the maximum number of Metadata items is that you need to match in order to match every time. @tbutz I tried this with an automated email bot program called Zapier but I had issues with the encoding of the colon. as it produce an A with an accent on it… But I’m sure someone with better technical ability could produce something better
I think something like JustEat could be a quick and easy win for @Flux.
Since none of the takeaways/restaurants you can buy food from using JustEat are actually own by those companies, I imagine once someone orders using the JustEat app, a receipt is sent to the relevant takeaway/restaurant using some sort of API connection so they can prepare the food and have the delivery details.
So Flux would just have to build something on JustEat’s system which sends the same receipt details sent to the takeway/restaurant to them if a Monzo card is used.
The same would also be true for Deliveroo.
Of course it could be more complicated than I’m suggesting, but bringin a company like JustEat or Deliveroo on board would be an easy way of quickly expanding Flux across the country.
@tbutz Changed focus a little bit recently to work on a different aspect of it, but yes I’m still planning on pushing this forward even further.
The jump from hacking it together to making it production ready isn’t always the same Writing it in something like Node might actually be a bit easier but I was awkward and thought hey let’s do it in Swift
I’ve been working on parsing .txt emails (to avoid the hassle of HTML) to create Monzo receipts. I tried to make it as generic as possible but found it easier in the end to write regex expressions to parse the emails I knew I cared about. it currently works for Asos emails and It’s a starting point for anyone wanting to work Monzo receipts - https://github.com/jonolock91/monzo_email_to_receipt
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Writing it in something like Node might actually be a bit easier but I was awkward and thought hey let’s do it in Swift 