Snap a receipt in Starlog and two things fill themselves in: the store name and the amount. A third field — the date — sits there waiting for you. For a lot of people that's the surprising one. The date is right there on the slip, printed in plain digits; surely reading it is the easy part? It turns out the date is the single most ambiguous field on a receipt, and handing it to you rather than guessing is a deliberate choice. Once you see why, you'll want to set it yourself anyway — because the date decides which month, quarter, and tax year an expense lands in, and that's not a call worth letting a scanner make quietly.
Why the date is the ambiguous one
The store name appears once, near the top, in the biggest text on the slip. The amount you can reconcile against your bank. The date has neither of those advantages. Three things conspire against it:
- There's usually more than one date on the slip. The transaction date, a separate settlement or "batch" date, the card's expiry, a "valid until" line on a coupon, a print timestamp. They're all formatted like dates, and only one of them is the day the money left your account.
- The format itself is ambiguous. Is 03/04 the 4th of March or the 3rd of April? The digits alone don't tell you — the answer depends entirely on which country's convention the point-of-sale system was set to.
- It's often the faintest thing on the receipt. The date frequently prints small, at the very top or bottom — exactly the region that fades first on thermal paper or gets cropped when you photograph the slip in a hurry. Faded thermal is a known blind spot, and the date is usually the first casualty.
03/04 means two different things
This is the part that matters most for Starlog, because it serves freelancers and small businesses in both the US and India — two places that write dates in opposite orders.
In the US, 03/04 is March 4th: month first. In India, the same slip reads as the 3rd of April: day first. A scanner staring at the digits "03/04" has no reliable way to know which convention the shop's till was set to — a receipt printed in Bengaluru and one printed in Boston can look identical and mean dates a month apart. Guess wrong and the expense doesn't vanish; it quietly files itself into the wrong month. That's the worst kind of OCR error: not a blank you know to fill, but a confident answer that looks finished and is off by weeks.
So rather than guess a convention and be silently wrong for half our users, we don't guess. You set the date — and you, unlike the scanner, know whether you were in Boston or Bengaluru.
What Starlog fills, and what it leaves to you
Worth being plain about the division of labour, because it's the same everywhere in the app. Starlog runs OCR on your device and pre-fills the two fields it can read reliably: the store name and the amount. The date and the category are yours to set. Every field, including the two it filled, stays editable, and the original image is kept in your own Google Drive so the slip itself is always there to settle a question.
That's not OCR falling short — it's drafting the easy parts and keeping a human on the ambiguous one. The store and amount are low-ambiguity: read them, pre-fill them, let you glance and confirm. The date is high-ambiguity, so it's the one field where a two-second human decision beats a confident machine guess every time.
The date you want isn't always the one printed
Here's the second reason to own the date: the date printed on the slip isn't always the one your books want.
- Card payments. The slip shows when you tapped; your statement shows when the charge settled — often a day or two later. For most purposes the transaction date on the receipt is the right one, but if you're reconciling against a card statement, know which you're using and be consistent.
- Cash. There's no statement to reconcile against, so the slip's date is your only record. That makes capturing it correctly the whole game.
- Deposits and pre-payments. Pay a deposit in March for work delivered in June and the "date" that matters for your books may not be the one the receipt shows at all. This is squarely a confirm-with-your-accountant situation.
The point isn't that these are hard — it's that they're judgment calls a scanner can't make for you, because the right answer depends on your books, not on the ink.
Setting it in two seconds
None of this is a burden if you capture the receipt at the moment you get it, which is the habit worth building anyway. At the counter, the date isn't a puzzle — it's today. You barely have to think about it. Starlog drafts the store and amount, you tap the date to today (or leave it if it already is), and you're done before you've put your card away.
The date only becomes work when you let receipts pile up and scan a backlog weeks later. Then the printed date on the slip is your anchor — read it off the image, mind the day/month order for where it was bought, and set it. The one mercy of a backlog is that the receipt image preserves the date even when your memory doesn't, which is the whole argument for keeping the picture and not just the number.
Why the month it lands in matters (US and India)
It's tempting to treat the date as a rounding error — near enough is fine. It isn't, because the date decides which reporting period an expense belongs to, and periods have edges.
- In the US, an expense dated December 31 versus January 1 falls in different tax years, and quarterly estimated taxes mean even a month's slip can push a deduction into the wrong quarter.
- In India, the financial year runs April to March, so a late-March receipt misdated into April jumps an entire financial year — and GST returns are filed monthly, so the month a purchase lands in is the month you'd claim against. (Keeping the receipts to back that up is its own discipline.)
Get the date right at capture and none of this is ever a problem. Get it wrong on a slip you scanned in a hurry and it surfaces at year-end as an expense in the wrong period — confirm the specifics with your CA or CPA, but the fix is always cheaper before the return than after.
The takeaway
The date is the one field on a receipt worth setting yourself, and Starlog is built that way on purpose. It's the most ambiguous thing on the slip — several dates to choose from, a format that means different days in different countries, and often the faintest ink on the page — so rather than guess a convention and be quietly wrong, the app reads the store and amount and leaves the date to the person who actually knows it. Capture the receipt when you get it, set the date to today, and the one field a scanner can't safely fill costs you all of two seconds — while landing every expense in the month it truly belongs to.