Lemon

Revision as of 19:25, 12 May 2013

Lemon (whose name was perhaps the result of the fact that all the less-sour fruits were already taken) started in 2011 as an app to scan sales receipts, which were then read, interpreted, and categorized for you by their back-end server software and made available for you to see, individually and in totals by category, on the app and on the web. It was a pretty neat idea, for everybody from businesspeople needing to sort their receipts for expense reporting to packrats hoarding all their sales receipts since 1954 in the hopes of eventually finding something useful to do with them. At the start, a free Lemon account let you scan an unlimited number of receipts, and a paid add-on added the functionality of including complete line-item detail in the scanned receipts instead of just the total as given to free accounts.

They encouraged you to store all your receipts on Lemon's cloud of servers, then toss the originals; one of Lemon's blog postings mentioned how some study or other determined that the chemicals in receipt paper were hazardous to your health, so the sooner you dump all of your receipt hoard the better! What could possibly go wrong with that?

As it turned out, the businessperson-and-packrat market apparently wasn't the basis of a sufficiently lucrative business model, so they executed a sharp turn in their app's functionality. After introducing "Lemon wallet" functionality where your credit cards, loyalty cards, and other stuff in your wallet is stored (if you trust them enough to give them all your card numbers), they steadily shifted their efforts to this new feature, letting the classic receipt functions wither away. Each successive update removed more functionality; by 2013 they were terminating the web interface to see your spending history in favor of a bare-bones site that only lets you get at basic account info like your name and e-mail address; you can only get at the receipt data on the app now, and that seems to only show you the last two years of receipts (tough luck, packrat who scanned in all his receipts from 1954). Now they don't even import information from receipts any more (which was their primary feature when they started); they just scan in an image and make you do the work of entering the amount and merchant name and category.

So it's a good idea, if you have any receipt data stored in their system, to export whatever you can of it while it's possible. Unfortunately, the export feature is one of the features only available to paid accounts, but there is a "free trial" you can sign up for on the app. If you do that, you can go through and get Lemon to export data as a CSV e-mail attachement, or save it to your account in one of several other services. You have to do this month by month by selecting dates in a pulldown (there's no "export all" feature), and this seems to only go back two years no matter how many earlier receipts you may have imported. The exported data includes only the totals of each receipt, no line items (even if you had a paid account in the past when they stored line items for such users).

In the web dashboard interface (which is going away in June 2013, but is temporarily accessible until then), there's also an export feature, and receipts over 2 years old are visible, but it tells you that it's a "paid account feature" even after you've signed up for a trial account, so you can't export from there, apparently.

Exported data format

The exported data is a CSV file with these fields:

"#","Date","Time","Merchant","Total","Currency","Total in USD","Address","ZIP","State","Country","Tax","Note","Main Category","Sub Category","Expense Category","Image URL","Personal","(other user-created categories come here)"

The first field is a consecutive number of the transaction within the particular export file (not a unique number for your whole history).

Dates are in the format "02 Mar, 2013", and times are 24-hour "hh:mm".

Oddly, the street address, state, zip code, and country are included, but not the city.

Image URLs are within the host repl1.lemon.com, and lead to pictures of the scanned receipts. There appears to be no security to them beyond the "security-by-obscurity" of the cryptic pathnames within the URL; it might be possible to figure out how to see other people's receipts by tweaking the URLs (though people have been prosecuted before for exploiting such vulnerabilities in other companies' systems; it's considered "hacking" even if it's done with a browser address bar). One also never knows how long Lemon will choose to leave those images online; the URLs could break any time.