What Your Receipts Reveal and How Tasarruf Protects Them

A shopping receipt looks harmless. It is a list of groceries. But a stack of receipts says a lot: the neighbourhood you shop in, the time you usually go, how many people you feed, sometimes your name, your loyalty number, or part of your card number. Before you hand that stack to any app, it is fair to ask what happens to it.

What a receipt can contain

Depending on the shop and country, a receipt or invoice may include:

• the store, its address and its tax number,
• the date and time of purchase,
• every item, with quantities and prices,
• discounts, VAT and the payment method,
• a loyalty card number,
• the last digits of a payment card, sometimes more,
• for invoices: the buyer’s name, address, phone, e-mail, and in Turkey the national ID number (TCKN).

Some of this is what makes price tracking possible. Some of it has nothing to do with prices at all.

Keep only what is needed: an allowlist

Tasarruf extracts from an allowlist. Instead of reading everything and deleting the sensitive parts, it only keeps the fields on a fixed list: store, date, lines, quantities, unit prices, discounts, VAT, total, payments. Everything else is not stored.

Kept	Never stored
Store name and seller’s tax number	Buyer name
Date and lines	Buyer address and phone
Quantities, prices, discounts, VAT	Buyer e-mail
Total and payment amounts	National ID number (TCKN)
Card last 4 digits	Loyalty number, full card number

Photos: cleaned and encrypted

Receipt photos are still useful, for example to check a line later. They are handled carefully:

• Re-encoded. Each image is re-encoded, which removes EXIF metadata, including GPS location from the phone’s camera.
• Encrypted per account. Images are encrypted with a key that belongs to your account only.
• Deletable on their own. You can delete the photo of a receipt and keep the receipt’s data, so your price history stays complete without the image.

No name, no e-mail, no phone

When you first open Tasarruf, it creates an anonymous account. There is no sign-up form asking for your name, e-mail or phone number. Later, if you want to protect the account, you can add a passkey. Not adding one never blocks any feature.

There are no ads, no data selling and no tracking SDK in the app.

The AI provider, named up front

Reading a crumpled receipt reliably requires a capable model. Tasarruf’s server sends the receipt to an OpenAI model to read the lines. This is disclosed before your first scan: the app asks for your consent and names OpenAI. You can withdraw that consent later.

The model’s answer is never trusted as is. The server checks that lines add up to the total, that quantity times unit price equals each line total, that VAT per rate and payments match, and that every amount appears on the receipt. The allowlist applies to what is stored, whatever the model returns.

Your data, your exit

• Export everything as JSON, free. Your receipts, lines and products, in a format you can open elsewhere.
• Delete your account in the app or on the website. Everything is gone within 30 days.

Export and account deletion are free on every plan, including the free one.

What Tasarruf does not do

Some things are left out on purpose. Tasarruf does not:

• connect to your bank,
• read your e-mail inbox (you share e-Arşiv PDFs yourself, see importing e-Arşiv PDFs),
• compare your prices with other users,
• infer anything about health or religion from what you buy,
• send push notifications.

Practical tips for any receipt app

Whatever you use, a few habits help:

• Check what an app asks for at sign-up. Price tracking does not need your name.
• Look for a way to export and delete your data before you start, not after.
• Check whether the app tells you which outside services see your receipts.
• Crop out anything you do not want to share, such as a handwritten note on the back.

How Tasarruf helps

Tasarruf gives you a personal price history and monthly spending from your receipts while storing only what that requires: an anonymous account, an allowlist of fields, encrypted photos you can delete, a named AI provider with consent, free export, and full deletion within 30 days. Read more about Tasarruf.