If you’ve ever tried to keep track of your receipts, you know how quickly it turns into a mess. Some are paper, some digital, and some are screenshots that you’ll forget about in your phone’s gallery. I’ve tried everything to get a handle on them. India-specific money management apps. Expensify. Google Sheets. I even built a little Notion template to manually track my receipts. And while each of them worked well enough for a while, they all broke down in the same few ways. Either they were too clunky to use daily, didn’t play nice with different file types, were too complicated for family members to use, or locked useful features behind subscriptions I didn’t want to pay for. But it wasn’t until I tried a self-hosted tool called Receipt Wrangler that I found a system that finally made sense.
From Google Sheets to Expensify, nothing clicked till I tried out Receipt Wrangler.
I’ll be honest. I wasn’t expecting much when I stumbled upon the app’s Github page. The description is minimal, the documentation isn’t exactly welcoming, and there’s no flashy pitch video or subscription model trying to upsell me. However, installing Receipt Wrangler isn’t as complicated as it might look. The documentation might seem intimidating at first, but unlike many open-source projects, the developer has done a solid job detailing nearly every part of the installation process. I had it up and running using Docker on my Synology NAS within minutes.