Expenses & receipts: what you spent, where, and on what

You come back from a trip with a pocket full of receipts. Filing them one by one is only worth it if you can ask something useful afterwards — like whether that pizza really was more expensive this year.

Alexandria stores a receipt as three things you can query separately:

• an expense — the receipt itself: its moment, its totals, the photo
• a place — reused every time you go back, so spending at one restaurant adds up
• a purchase per line item — what it was, how many, what it cost

Expenses and purchases land on your timeline under the moment of the transaction. A place does not: you did not do a restaurant on a date.

Turn it on

Expenses is a domain — a ready-made set of tables. In the app, open Settings → Domains and press Enable on Expenses. From the command line:

akb domain enable expenses

Afterwards they are ordinary tables. Rename them, add your own columns, filter and sort them like anything else. Enabling again writes nothing, and is also how a table you damaged gets repaired.

File a receipt

Open the Expenses table and press New receipt. The merchant, the date and the total are required — an expense with no cost cannot be compared to anything. Everything else is optional: subtotal, tax, tip, payment method, address, and a row per item you bought.

Amounts are typed the way you would say them, 36.00 EUR. They are stored as exact decimals, never rounded, in a canonical form — so 36.00 EUR reads back as EUR 36.

Check the vault before saving and Alexandria answers two questions without writing anything:

• Which place is this? Places you have been to that match are offered. Pick one and this receipt joins it, instead of creating a near-duplicate place. Nothing is picked for you, even for an identical match — a wrong merge is invisible afterwards, while a wrong split is obvious.
• Have I already filed this? Receipts that look the same are flagged. It is a warning, not a refusal: two coffees at one place on one day happen.

Attach photo archives the receipt image with it. The same photo attached twice is stored once.

Ask the question you filed them for

akb rows Purchases --where "title~pizza" --sort unit_price

Pizza Margherita   Pizzeria ai Baffetto — 2025-07-19   EUR 15   2   EUR 7.5
Pizza Margherita   Pizzeria da Enzo — 2026-07-19       EUR 18   2   EUR 9

Money is compared exactly and only within one currency, so a euro total never sorts against a dollar one. See property types.

From the command line

akb receipts commit takes a JSON draft you write by hand — editing the draft is the review step, so a misspelled field is refused rather than silently dropped.

akb receipts commit draft.json --image IMG_1234.jpg

{
  "source": "manual",
  "external_id": "rome-2026-07-19-enzo",
  "transaction_datetime": "2026-07-19T20:35:00",
  "merchant_name": "Pizzeria da Enzo",
  "address": "Via dei Vascellari 29",
  "city": "Roma",
  "country": "IT",
  "total": "36.00 EUR",
  "payment_method": "card",
  "purchases": [
    { "external_id": "l1", "name": "Pizza Margherita", "quantity": 2,
      "unit_price": "9.00 EUR", "line_total": "18.00 EUR" }
  ]
}

source and external_id are the receipt's identity, so committing the same pair again corrects the rows it already wrote instead of filing a second copy. It corrects but never deletes: if you drop a line item and re-commit, the purchase row from the earlier run stays until you delete it yourself. Only total is required among the amounts. A receipt brings its tables with it, so this works even before you have enabled the domain.

Where it lives

Nothing here is a separate database. An expense is a note; its values live in the table's frontmatter; the place and the photo are ordinary links. It stays plain Markdown you can read, edit, back up and sync like everything else.