Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin)

Finding things in Expense

The search box on the expense list in Expense understands fields now. report:, category:, and merchant: match exactly, case-insensitive, and description: matches anywhere in the description. Values can contain spaces: report:2026 travel is one filter, not two. Repeating a key ORs (merchant:shell merchant:chevron), mixing keys ANDs,

How Expense reads a receipt

Every receipt that lands in Expense has to become structured data: merchant, date, amount, category. A language model can do that, but model calls cost money and seconds, so the pipeline is designed around not making them. Most receipts never reach a model. The order goes like this. Text first.

Cmd+K at Expense

Expense now has a command palette. Press Cmd+K anywhere (Ctrl+K on Windows and Linux) and type what you want to do. Go somewhere, add something, search, export. The mouse is optional. Some of the keys I actually use: * g e expenses, g r reports, g m emails, g

Connect Fastmail: your receipts move from inbox to Expense

Most expense apps only auto-import receipts from Gmail accounts. Expense now works with Fastmail — this is how it works, what it gets right, and what it lacks. I built Expense for people who file taxes as individuals — freelancers, self-employed, side hustlers. The pain point is always the same:

Reconcile in Expense

And I made a cool thing in Expense that I find incredibly useful. Once a month comes along and I have my statements, I import the PDFs into Expense and let it reconcile the expenses. It looks up if the expense already exists in my list and reconciles it if

August 6th, 2026 2 min read

Expense — receipt tracking for easier tax filing

$9.20 to steward an app into existence in one week. It's made of 38,000 lines of code and 15,700 lines of comments. Tests make up about 21% of the code. Spec size is about 3,200 words. I understand that "vibe code" feels