Expense

Expense is a receipt tracker with no friction: receipts arrive by email and file themselves, mileage prices itself from IRS rates, and an AI assistant does the data entry you'd rather skip — capture, log, and ask, all through MCP.

Screenshots

What it does:

• Log expenses two ways: receipt-based (upload/scan an image, add date, report, category, merchant, amount) and mileage (drive route on a map — Leaflet + OSRM — with configurable per-year mileage rates)
• Receipts by email: forward a receipt to your inbox address and it's parsed (merchant/amount/category) and added automatically — see below
• Organize into reports and categories; every receipt image is stored and auto-renamed to a convention (YYYY-MM-DD_Report_Name.jpg)
• Export: PDF per report (with embedded receipt images) and a ZIP of everything
• Settings: reports, categories, mileage rates, home location for mileage routes

Stack:

• React Router v8 (framework mode) + Tailwind v4, TypeScript
• Postgres via Prisma — accounts, users, expenses, reports, categories, settings, mileage, image blobs
• Images: Postgres BYTEA (prod and dev/test) — no external store
• Deployed on Vercel + Neon (git push to main auto-deploys)

Auth & accounts (the recent work):

• Email/password login (scrypt-hashed), sessions via signed cookies
• Multi-user accounts: each account has its own data, users in the same account share everything, other accounts fully isolated
• New users join an account via an 8-char invite code (shown in Settings, regenerable); anyone can self-signup into a fresh account
• Image keys are namespaced per account so two accounts can never collide

Accounts & sharing

Login is email/password (scrypt-hashed) — the email is the login name, stored lowercase and unique, format-validated at signup/join. Every expense, report, category, and setting belongs to an account; everyone in an account shares them, and accounts are fully isolated from each other.

• Sign up → creates a brand-new account (starts empty).
• Join → enter an account's invite code (Settings → Account) to share that account's data.
• The first account/user is bootstrapped from APP_EMAIL/APP_PASSWORD when the database is empty; pre-email accounts get their login backfilled from APP_EMAIL on first start (initStore).

SEO & AI discovery

The public marketing pages double as the site's AI-search surface: when someone asks an assistant for a free expense tracker, GPTBot / OAI-SearchBot / ClaudeBot / PerplexityBot crawl and quote them. The copy is written as standalone, quotable answers that name the app and its URL, and it lives in ONE place — app/lib/seo-content.ts — which renders every surface:

Supporting plumbing: public/robots.txt explicitly allows the AI crawlers (GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot / Claude-SearchBot / Claude-User, PerplexityBot / Perplexity-User, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, meta-externalagent) while app routes stay blocked, and public/sitemap.xml lists the public pages.

These routes are public (see the root loader in app/root.tsx); everything else still requires a session.

What it does

• Track receipt expenses (date, merchant, amount, image, category, report) and mileage expenses (date, 2+ addresses, distance, amount, report).
• Mileage routes run Home → stops → Home; distance is computed via OSRM and the amount from a per-year mileage rate. Maps use Leaflet + OpenStreetMap — no API keys required.
• Incomplete expenses are highlighted so they're easy to finish.
• Paste (⌘V) or upload an image anywhere to start a new receipt.
• Export: each report as a PDF (grouped by category, with all receipt images), or everything as a ZIP (CSV + images named YYYY-MM-DD_REPORT_FILE.ext).
• AI assistants (MCP): any MCP client — Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor — connects by signing in with your account (OAuth; no API keys). See AI assistants below.

AI assistants (MCP)

The app speaks the Model Context Protocol at https://expense.labnotes.org/mcp (auth: OAuth 2.1 authorization-code + PKCE — sign in with your account and approve the connection; no API keys). An assistant connected to your account can:

• Capture a receipt — a photo or PDF in the chat runs the same OCR + extraction pipeline as the web app and is categorized from your own merchant history.
• Log a drive — give it stops in plain English; it geocodes, routes, and prices the trip at the year's IRS rate.
• Answer spending questions — "how much did I spend on flights last quarter?" gets the exact total from your data.
• Build reports — create/close reports, move expenses into them, export a report PDF.
• Reconcile — paste a bank statement CSV; it finds every charge with no matching receipt (read-only).

Connect any MCP client:

// Claude Code — .mcp.json (no headers needed: the client discovers OAuth)
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "expense": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://expense.labnotes.org/mcp"
    }
  }
}

The client opens your browser; you sign in and click Allow. Manage connections (per-token delete, full disconnect) in Settings → Agents & API (MCP). See docs/mcp.md for the full reference and docs/mcp-directories.md for the directory listings.

State

Storage is Postgres-only via Prisma (prisma/schema.prisma is the single schema source of truth; the client is generated to prisma/generated by pnpm build:prisma). DATABASE_URL is required at startup (the app exits with a clear error otherwise). Receipt images live in Postgres BYTEA (image_blobs) in prod and dev — no separate storage service.

All reads/writes go through app/lib/store.server.ts (→ app/lib/database.ts, Prisma queries scoped by accountId); image storage is behind app/lib/images.server.ts (Prisma imageBlob). Keys are images/{accountId}/... pathnames on every backend — namespaced per account so two accounts can never collide on the same filename. Schema changes: edit prisma/schema.prisma, then prisma migrate dev --name … locally and pnpm db:push (or pnpm db:migrate) before deploying.

data/ — removed

The file-era migration source (data/*.csv + data/images/* and the pnpm migrate-data one-off) was deleted in the Jul 2026 cleanup — data now lives in the database, and importing from Expensify happens via scripts/import-expensify.ts. Cloning prod uses scripts/clone (prisma/backup.sql).

Quick start

Environment variables

Load order: real process.env (Vercel dashboard, or inline) wins; a local .env file fills the gaps. DATABASE_URL is required; .env is gitignored. if (!hasDatabase()) {

dev / test — local .env:

# .env (project root, gitignored)
DATABASE_URL=postgres://assaf@localhost/expense_dev   # include the local user
SESSION_SECRET=…         # signs the session cookie (random hex)
APP_EMAIL=…           # bootstrap: first account's email (empty DB only)
APP_PASSWORD=…           # bootstrap: first account's password (empty DB only)
# Receipts by email (all optional):
# RESEND_API_KEY=re_…            INBOUND_EMAIL_WEBHOOK_SECRET=whsec_…
# INBOUND_EMAIL_ADDRESS=receipts@example.com   # forwarding + reply sender
# DEEPSEEK_API_KEY=sk-…          RECEIPT_OCR_MODE=auto

On an empty database the first account + user are bootstrapped from APP_EMAIL/APP_PASSWORD (fail-closed if missing); afterwards users are created through the app's signup/join flow. SESSION_SECRET is always required. APP_EMAIL/APP_PASSWORD can be removed from .env once you have at least one user.

Accounts created before email login (username era) keep their old username as the stored email until APP_EMAIL is set — initStore then backfills that address onto the bootstrap (oldest) user, so the configured credentials keep working.

Tests intentionally hardcode expense_test (Postgres incl. image blobs), ignore the local database, and reset the schema from Prisma on each run (pnpm test:db:push in the test setup).

prod — Vercel: set env vars in the project dashboard (Settings → Environment Variables): DATABASE_URL (Vercel Postgres / Neon pooled URL), SESSION_SECRET, and (only until the first user exists) APP_EMAIL / APP_PASSWORD. Vercel injects them at runtime; .env never exists there.

Receipts by email

Forward a receipt email to your inbox address and it's parsed and added automatically: the merchant, amount, and category are extracted, the receipt is stored as an image, and the expense date is the date of the email being forwarded. If something can't be processed, a reply email explains what happened.

How it decides what to import:

• Receipt attached as PDF/image → that attachment becomes the receipt image; text is extracted from the PDF text layer (or OCR'd) to get the merchant/amount/category.
• Receipt inline in the email (ASCII/HTML) → the email body is turned into an image and stored; the text is parsed the same way.
• Multiple attachments (e.g. a receipt + a logo or signature) → only the actual receipt is handled (heuristics + model tiebreak).
• The sender must be on the account's allowed sender list (Settings → Receipts by email); anything else gets a "sender not recognized" reply. You can add several addresses. If the same address is allowed by multiple accounts, the account that added it first claims it — removing it there falls through to the next account that allows it.
• Successful imports don't email you; incomplete ones (missing merchant, amount, …) create the expense anyway and reply listing what's missing.
• Each email is processed at most once (idempotent per email id).

Setup (Resend + DeepSeek)

Vercel has no inbound email, so receipt emails are received by Resend (receiving = parse email → POST webhook) and parsed by DeepSeek (deepseek-v4-flash). Replies on failure go out through Resend too.

1. Create a Resend account and add a domain (e.g. expense.labnotes.org) — you'll point MX/DKIM/SPF DNS records at Resend.

2. Resend → Receiving: add a receiving domain and an inbound route (catch-all or receipts@…) that POSTs to https://<your-app>/api/inbound-email.

3. On the webhook, copy the signing secret (whsec_…).

4. Create a DeepSeek API key.

5. Set env vars (dev .env, prod Vercel dashboard):

   bash

   RESEND_API_KEY=re_…                     # receive + send replies
   INBOUND_EMAIL_WEBHOOK_SECRET=whsec_…    # verifies the webhook signature
   INBOUND_EMAIL_ADDRESS=receipts@expense.labnotes.org  # forwarding address + reply sender
   DEEPSEEK_API_KEY=sk-…                   # receipt text/OCR extraction
   DEEPSEEK_MODEL=deepseek-v4-flash        # optional, this is the default
   RECEIPT_OCR_MODE=auto                   # auto|deepseek|tesseract (default auto)
   

   All are optional — without them the webhook returns 503 and receipts aren't imported.

6. In the app: Settings → Receipts by email → add each address you'll forward from (you can add several), then forward a receipt to your inbound address.

Notes:

• DeepSeek vision: the hosted DeepSeek API is text-only today — image receipts are OCR'd locally with tesseract.js (worker/fonts fetched from a CDN at runtime). Set RECEIPT_OCR_MODE=deepseek if/when the hosted model accepts images (it tries vision first and falls back automatically on auto).
• Scanned PDFs (no text layer) are rasterized and OCR'd; the first pages become the stored receipt image.
• HTML receipts are stored as a rendered text image (monospace receipt sheet) — no headless browser needed.
• Forwarding as attachment (.eml) — the receipt nested inside the .eml is not unpacked; use normal inline forwarding (Gmail/iOS quote the original in the body).
• Webhook processing runs up to 60s (Vercel maxDuration) — enough for attachment download + OCR + extraction.

Quick start

Prerequisites: Postgres running locally (brew services start postgresql@18).

createdb expense_dev          # once
pnpm install
# create .env with the local values above
pnpm db:push                    # create the schema from prisma/schema.prisma
pnpm dev                        # reads .env

Running the server without DATABASE_URL exits immediately with a clear error — there is no file-based fallback.

pnpm check        # prisma generate + typegen + format + lint + typecheck
pnpm build        # production build (build:prisma runs first)
pnpm start        # serve the production build (port 3000)
pnpm test         # resets expense_test from Prisma and runs the suite

Node 24+ and pnpm 11+ (developed/tested on Node 26).

Deployment

Vercel (recommended): the app deploys with Vercel's zero-config React Router support — no preset needed. (@vercel/react-router's vercelPreset() is still pinned to React Router v7 as of this writing — track vercel/vercel#16730; the zero-config path builds one SSR function that serves every route.)

1. Push to GitHub (already configured: origin → assaf/expense).

2. In Vercel: Add New → Project → Import assaf/expense. Framework is auto-detected as React Router; vercel.json pins the build command.

3. Set env vars in the project (Settings → Environment Variables):

   • DATABASE_URL — Vercel Postgres / Neon pooled URL. Tables are created automatically on first request.
   • Node 24+ (engines; the project runs on Node 26); pick Node 26 in project settings if Vercel doesn't match automatically.

4. One-time data import is done — the CSV source under data/ was deleted in the Jul 2026 cleanup (data verified in the database: 306 expenses, 247 images). Import from Expensify now goes through scripts/import-expensify.ts; cloning prod locally uses scripts/clone.

5. Deploy. Test the app is behind Deployment Protection or basic auth — the app has no built-in login (single-user personal tool).

./scripts/deploy            # check + tests + deploy
./scripts/deploy --skip-tests

Vercel has its own environment management (dashboard) — set DATABASE_URL there directly (all images are stored in the database, so no other storage env is needed).

Maps & geocoding

Uses free OpenStreetMap services (Nominatim for geocoding, OSRM for routing, OSM raster tiles for the map). Rate-limited but fine for personal use. If OSRM is unavailable, distance falls back to straight-line (marked "approx.").