CartEncore vs budgeting apps
CartEncore isn’t a budgeting app
The thing a monthly total cannot show you
I have kept my own household’s receipts for about nineteen months — 175 of them. Somewhere in there is a 100 g bar of Lindt Excellence 70%, which we buy most weeks.
We buy it on promotion. Not occasionally: it appears on 29 receipts, and on 24 of them there is a discount printed on the line. So the story in this house is “we always get that one on promotion”, and the story is true.
Here is what the receipts say. Over those seventeen months the shelf price rose 67%. What I actually paid rose 68% — discounted at the start, discounted at the end, two-thirds more at the end than at the beginning. Fourteen months of almost never paying full price, and the thing still ended up costing me nearly double.
No single trip would have made anyone notice. Every one of them felt like a good day.
And none of it was visible to a budgeting app, which is not a failing on its part. To the bank it was the same supermarket, the same weekly charge, the same category, month after month. The number that changed was inside the receipt, and the receipt was in a drawer.
Why this exists
There is a quieter version of the chocolate story, and it is the more common one. A tub of butter I have bought twenty times went up three times over five months — five cents, then ten, then five — and then sat still for the next eleven. Under nine per cent in total, in moves nobody notices. What you notice, a year later, is that butter costs more, without being able to say when that happened or by how much.
That is the shape of almost everything in a supermarket. Prices do not announce themselves. They move a little, wait, and move again, and the only place the whole sequence is written down is on a series of receipts nobody keeps.
GROCERY MARKET $86.40 is what your bank hands your budgeting app. That line is all it gets. CartEncore starts from the receipt behind it — the seventeen items that added up to $86.40 — and then keeps them, so that the eleventh time you buy the same butter, the previous ten are still there.
I spent years running a site that told people where groceries were cheaper. It worked, and it taught me that I knew the price of milk across seven chains and had no idea what my own house had spent on meat the year before. CartEncore came out of that second part.
The receipt behind that line looks different in every chain — what US stores actually print →
Two different jobs
A budgeting app answers a question about the future: how much should we spend on food next month, and are we on track. It needs a plan, and it needs the plan to hold. YNAB in particular is very good at this, and has twenty years of method behind it.
CartEncore answers a question about the past: what did we buy, and what has it been costing us. It needs no plan at all. It needs receipts, which you already have.
There are also apps that read a receipt and split it into your budget categories. That is useful, and it is a different thing again — it makes this week’s shop legible. It does not tell you what the same product cost you last February.
You can run all of them, and I run two. A budgeting app can tell me the grocery number was $480 this month. It has no way of telling me that part of that number is a chocolate bar costing two-thirds more than it did last year, because it never sees the bar — it sees the shop. That is not a gap in YNAB. It is a gap between the bank and the till, and no budgeting app is on that side of it.