How Ghostflation Reads Your Receipts in Seconds

You snap a photo of your grocery receipt. Three seconds later, every item and price appears in your dashboard. Here's what happens in between.

Step 1: Image capture

When you take a photo (or upload one from your gallery), we send the image to our secure processing pipeline. The image is encrypted in transit and temporarily stored only long enough to process — then deleted.

Step 2: OCR (Optical Character Recognition)

We use Google Cloud Vision to extract raw text from the receipt image. This handles:

• - Wrinkled, folded, or slightly blurry receipts
• - Different fonts, layouts, and thermal print styles
• - Multi-column formats used by some stores
• - Both English and French text (for Canadian bilingual receipts)

The output is raw text — a jumble of words, numbers, and store-specific formatting.

Step 3: AI parsing

Raw OCR text isn't useful on its own. "BNLS CHKN BRST" doesn't obviously mean "Boneless Chicken Breast." This is where our AI comes in.

We use Anthropic's Claude to parse the raw text into structured data:

• - Store name and location
• - Date of purchase
• - Line items: product name, quantity, price
• - Subtotal, tax, and total
• - Discounts and savings applied

The AI understands store-specific abbreviations, handles split lines, and distinguishes between items and non-item text (like loyalty card numbers or payment method lines).

Step 4: Normalization

"2% MILK 4L", "NEILSON 2% 4L MILK", and "HOMO MILK 2% JUG" are all the same product category. We normalize item names so your price tracking works across stores and receipt formats.

This lets us: - Track the same product over time even if different stores print it differently - Compare prices across stores for the same item - Detect shrinkflation when a normalized product appears with different sizes

Step 5: Your dashboard

Within seconds, the parsed data appears in your dashboard: - Items are added to your price history - Your Personal Inflation Rate updates - Any shrinkflation flags are triggered - Your monthly spending totals adjust

Why accuracy matters

Every percentage point in your inflation rate is based on real price data from real receipts. If we mis-read $3.49 as $8.49, that skews everything. That's why we use a two-stage pipeline (OCR + AI) and let you review and correct any items before they're finalized.

Our current accuracy rate on item extraction is over 95% across Canadian and American grocery receipts. We're constantly improving as more receipts flow through the system.