A US grocery store receipt prints one column: a name and a price. Sometimes a weight, sometimes a quantity, usually neither. The name is cut to about twelve characters, so a tub of Imperial margarine becomes IMPR MARGRNE and a block of Kerrygold Irish butter becomes KRGD IR BTR. Tax is added at the end rather than sitting inside the shelf price, so the lines add up to less than the total — unless nothing in the basket was taxable.
CartEncore is an app that reads that. You scan a receipt with your phone and it keeps every line, so the eleventh time you buy the same thing, the previous ten are still there. An itemized history of your groceries, built from the paper you already get handed.
The point is what happens after fifty of them.
Most people looking for a grocery receipt app want this week’s spending broken out of one lump charge. That is worth having, and it is where most of them stop. One receipt scanned is a list. Two years of receipts is a memory: the same product, bought again and again, and what it has cost you each time. That is the thing no single receipt has ever shown anyone, because no single receipt can.
There is no list of supported stores, and that is a design decision rather than a gap. The engine does not recognize chains — it reads what is printed and checks that the sums add up. Which is just as well, because American chains disagree with each other about almost everything else.
Below is what that disagreement looks like, taken from real receipts rather than from documentation — if you want to see what that takes.
This is the part that surprises people who have only seen European receipts. There is no standard, and no chain uses a separate column:
Kroger and Fred Meyer mark the item with SC in the left margin and put the amount on its own line below it, positive and unsigned. Nothing on the paper says whether the price above is already net.
SC DUNCAN HNS CAKE MXPC 1.49 F
KROGER SAVINGS 0.50Safeway puts the minus after the number and, alone among these, prints the original price beside it. The arithmetic is all there: 4.29 less 1.79 is the 2.50 charged.
HONEY NUT CEREAL 2.50 S Regular Price 4.29 Card Savings 1.79-
Costco does the same trailing minus, but adds a coupon code and a pointer to the item number it comes off.
3226685 INSTNTPOT6QT 79.99 A 0000249998 /3226685 15.00-A
Walgreens stacks it — the old price above, the saving below, and a flag beside the price.
RED BULL ENRGY DRNK CNS 8.4OZ 6PK 61126943157 A 8.79 SALE REGULAR PRICE 9.99 MYWALGREENS SAVINGS 1.20
One small independent grocer does the one thing none of the chains do: the minus goes in front, on the item’s own row, before the name.
-$1.67 COL PANCETTA $4.99
Five conventions, five different meanings for the same number. This is exactly why the arithmetic check matters more than a per-chain rulebook. If the lines add up to the total, the prices are as charged. If they add up to more, exactly by the value of the discounts, the prices are before discount. That difference is detectable by addition, not by knowing anything about the shop.
These are the ones I have looked at closely. There are plenty of American chains I have not, and I would rather say so than pad the list.
Every line carries a twelve-digit barcode between the name and the price — the only chain here that puts one there. The name in front of it is cut hard: EDGE1Q 10W30, VF D GM 2000, GE REG JEAN.
A single letter at the end of the line is the tax code. Across the Walmart receipts here that letter is X, N or Y.
One receipt can carry several tax rates at once, and they are not numbered in sequence — a watch and its extended warranty, on the same receipt, come out as TAX 1 6.000 % and TAX 7 2.650 %. The warranty is taxed differently from the thing it covers.
Same group, same printing. Fuel points appear in the footer — Fuel Points Earned Today: 34, Total July Fuel Points: 245 — and sometimes as a line among the items, like eCpn July 2X FUEL.
The loyalty card prints in the middle of the item list, not the footer: KROGER PLUS CUSTOMER followed by a masked number. That placement is a genuine trap — it sits exactly where a product would.
Weight uses a WT prefix: WT 2.26 lb @ 0.49 /lb BANANAS 2.50 F. Bottle deposits, in Oregon, come per bottle on their own line.
The only chain here that prints an item number on every single line, five to seven digits, to the left of the name: 878209 SPRING MIX.
The membership line sits at the top and is not a charge. Note that the E some Costco receipts print on the left is not the taxable code — the tax code is the letter on the right (A, F, and T or H on older and Canadian receipts), with the rate spelled out in the footer.
Prints store section headers through the list — GROCERY, PRODUCE, REFRIG/FROZEN, BAKED GOODS. Quantity comes as a prefix: 3 QTY ORG CILANT. California bottle deposits get their own line as CRV.
No loyalty card, no member discount, nothing at all in that column. What it has instead is a tax summary by jurisdiction, three of them stacked on the same item — city, county, state — each with its own rate against the same amount.
Weighed items print Tare Weight beneath them, the packaging subtracted. It is also the only one here that prints a dollar sign.
Every one of these was read off paper by one person — who, and why it points inward →
CartEncore is not open yet. The receipt reader works and still has work left in it, and I would rather say that than take a signup for something that is not ready.
No bank connection, now or ever.
There is no list, because nothing in the engine is keyed to a store. It reads what is printed and checks whether it adds up, rather than matching against known chains. Every receipt behind this page went through the same generic path — the one that is given nothing about any shop — and the eight retailers they came from were never named to it.
Same answer, with a caveat I would rather give than skip: I have not put a receipt from those chains through it myself. The engine does not treat them differently, but I have not seen the paper.
You scan the paper one with your phone camera. Digital receipts — the e-receipt emailed to you, or the one saved in a store app — are a different shape and are not handled yet.
Canadian receipts print much like American ones, down to the tax letter. There is not enough here yet for a page of its own.
No, and there is no way to. CartEncore reads receipts, not accounts. A bank line tells you the shop and the total; it never sees what was in the basket. That difference is the whole argument against a budgeting app, and it is set out in full here.