Receept conserves paper, gains data

In a world were banks charge you to receive paper statements and stores ask for your email to send you a receipt, a programmer from Columbus decided to change the way receipts are used.

After a few months of sitting at the Brandery with two monitors and bottle of single malt scotch at his desk, Kevin Pfefferfle created Receept, a website geared toward both customers and merchants.

The idea is to give customers a place to store receipts easily with simple export tools so that you can print them you need for expense reports or taxes. While other similar services exist, many of them charge fees. Pfefferfle wouldn’t pay for that service as a consumer, so Receept will be free for consumers.

Merchants that have partnerships with Receept will be able to send a receipt directly to a user-created Receept account. If a customer doesn’t have an account created, an email will be sent with information to sign up. For merchants that don’t have a partnership with Receept, customers will be able to snap a photo of a receipt or forward an email receipt to their account, which will then be stored and organized. You will also be able to share receipts with specific people. You can categorize and share all personal purchases with a spouse, or all business purchases with your boss with a simple click.

To keep the service free for cutomers, Pfefferfle is working with merchants to give them consumer data. While specific data on what and how much a customer buys will not be shared, visiting habits and numbers will be. It will give merchants true data. In other words, when a customer fills out a survey or answers questions, vendors get an idea of spending habits, but Receept will be able to give merchants exact habits.

“We could tell Kroger, ‘People who shop at your store once a month also tend to shop at these other types of places,’ ” Pfefferfle says. “We can say that in a general sense and not violate anyone’s privacy.”

Receept is also working with the computer science department at Ohio State University to eventually be able to scan receipts for character recognition and create pie charts and graphs to see how and where you spend your money.

The next step for Pfefferfle is to partner with merchants, which he may be able to do at the iMedia Breakthrough Summit in Las Vegas this week. Receept is one of nine finalists at the summit that is recognized as a innovative conference for what’s next in the digital marketplace. Pfefferfle has confirmed meetings with representatives from Coca-Cola and American Express, among others.

By Evan Wallis