The Refinement Club

Dec 18th: Digital Receipts

The eighteenth day of The Refinement Club’s Advent calendar features an idea from The Refinement Club about digital receipts.

This week Ingrid Lea, Torny Hesle and Thale Høy-Petersen presented their idea for a budget-app. Something that would make all budget apps noticeably better is access to more information. The fact that what we buy is registered, but we only get access to where and how much through our online bank is annoying.

Problem:
Your online bank knows where you spent your money, but they don’t know what you bought. That’s fine when it comes to stores that only sell clothes or electronics, but it makes it impossible to automatically keep record of what you use on groceries, and also to make a household budget.

Idea:
Imagine that your online bank knows exactly what you have bought and not just where you bought the item. Then third part applications could easily categorize the items the way they want to. Imagine all the paper that could be saved, all those neat wallets and how we could stop being exposed to Bisphenol A.

This is something one single bank can’t do anything about, the whole system for paying digitally has to change. The stores need to be willing to share information. So we hope someone who can do something about this, realizes how useful a change like this could be for personal economy, and does something. We don’t care how, if the change involves paying with your mobile phone or with your retina, we just want to have access to and make use of the information we leave behind.

Would you like to submit your own idea to our calendar? Go ahead!