Expensify

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Build the expense tracking I actually need instead of Expensify — with a clear line around what stays outside.

**Do not build the payment rail.** Reimbursing people means moving money, which means regulation, bank integration and liability. Build everything up to the payment file and let the bank or the payroll system do the last step.

STACK
- Node 20+ with Fastify, server-rendered HTML with a little vanilla JS
- SQLite through better-sqlite3, WAL mode
- Tesseract for reading receipts locally
- Caddy in front

THE DATA MODEL
- expenses: id, person_id, spent_at, amount_cents, currency, merchant, category, project, receipt_id, note, status, submitted_at
- receipts: id, path, sha256, ocr_json, ocr_confidence, uploaded_at
- reports: id, person_id, period, status, submitted_at, approved_by, approved_at, exported_at
- approvals: id, report_id, approver_id, decision, note, at — append-only
- rates: date, base, quote, rate, source — **stored per day**, so a converted amount can be reproduced years later
- Money in integer minor units. Never a float, anywhere, for any reason

CAPTURE, WHICH MUST BE TRIVIAL
- Photograph a receipt on a phone, it uploads and creates a draft expense. If it takes more than two taps, expenses are entered in a spreadsheet at month end from memory
- Tesseract reads total, date and merchant; store the confidence and **pre-fill rather than decide**. An OCR error that silently changes an amount is a false accounting record
- Anything under a confidence threshold is highlighted for the person to confirm
- Duplicate detection on hash, and on amount plus date plus merchant — the same lunch submitted twice is the most common error and it is honest, not fraudulent

CURRENCY, WHICH IS WHERE HOMEMADE VERSIONS BREAK
- Store the original amount and currency, always. Convert for reporting using the stored rate for the spend date
- Never overwrite an amount with a converted one. **The receipt says €48 and the record must always say €48**

APPROVAL
- Submit a report, route by amount and by cost centre, approve or reject with a note. Every decision recorded and none of them editable
- A threshold above which a second approver is required, configurable
- Policy checks as warnings on submission — missing receipt above a limit, spend outside a date range, a category that needs a project — shown to the person before they submit rather than bounced back a week later

GETTING IT OUT
- A CSV per accounting system with the exact columns it expects, and a payment file for the bank in its own format
- Mark a report exported with the batch reference. **Reimbursed twice is the failure that costs real money**, and an export flag with a unique batch is what prevents it
- Receipts exported as files alongside, named by expense id, because the tax authority wants the image and not the row

RETENTION
- Receipts kept for the statutory period in your country, which is years, and never deleted before it

WHAT MATTERS MOST
Original currency preserved and a hard export flag. One keeps the records true; the other stops anybody being paid twice.