#receipt tracking

We first launched Lemon three months ago. Since that time, our team has been working tirelessly to improve our service, so that it is compelling for our customers. And people seem to be liking Lemon! We are grateful to the teams at Lifehacker,  The Next Web and TechCrunch for the nice things they recently had to say about us. Plus our customers have given us a ton of great suggestions, ideas and feedback.

Receipts sometimes remind me of the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. You may recall it – Goldilocks breaks into the bears’ house and explores their food, chairs and beds.  She finds things too hot, too cold, too big, to small, too firm, too soft. Then she tries the third one, and it’s always just right.

It seems like people generally fall into two receipt camps – too many or not enough. I’m in the first camp – I’m a receipt hoarder, collecting and reconciling all my receipts. They’re on my desk, in my wallet, in my files. The problem is that we often can’t figure out what to do with all these receipts. We have the data, but we just can’t figure out how to unlock and access the information.

My husband falls into the second camp – the receipt purgers. He never saves receipts. He never asks for one, and when he’s handed one, he crumples it up and throws it away. The problem for people in this camp is that they are often missing critical data. If I need to return an item that he purchased, I’m out of luck. If I want to check the price of something for a price comparison, I’m out of luck.

My sister recently bought clothes at an Old Navy store and received an email receipt for the purchase.  It reminded me of a great post about how receipts present an amazing opportunity for merchants to communicate with their customers — but it’s an opportunity that most merchants typically waste.

In an ideal world for a merchant, your receipt would be something you wanted to keep — something to remind you to go back to their store or site. It would be eye-catching, descriptive, substantial.  Obviously, that’s a hard (and expensive) receipt for most merchants to create with paper receipts.

But email receipts offer a great opportunity for marketing, and more and more merchants are capitalizing on this. Old Navy’s email receipt has all of the normal purchase data — item list, amount paid (with my sister’s credit card number carefully protected) and their return policy. But it also includes links to their site as well as links to other sites at Gap and Banana Republic.

Old Navy is careful to note that my sister has not been added to their marketing list. But they give her a very easy way to do so to take advantage of special offers.

February brings fresh Lemon news. We’re pleased to announce that based on input from our users, we have developed three premium plans to fit the unique needs of the individuals, families and businesses who rely on Lemon to manage their spending.

If you’re currently using the free version of Lemon, rest assured that you’ll still have access to all the great core features that you’ve come to love. But if one of our new premium plans fits your needs, you can upgrade any time. You’ll get all the core features, an ad-free environment, plus a new feature package tailored to your needs as a power user, family, and/or business.

Here’s what is coming:

Data Plan.  Want to know where each dollar goes? This plan lets you capture and analyze full receipt details, including the cost of each individual item, plus taxes and tips.

Family Plan.  Want to see how much you spend as a family? This plan lets you link up to 10 Lemon accounts so you can see where your family’s hard-earned money goes each month.