[rkagerer]

10 years ago I wrote a reconciliation tool in VBA in Excel. I scan I all the (mostly thermal-printed) receipts and it matches them to credit card charges. I always envisioned incorporating OCR to automatically extract the totals, but the libraries were never good enough for my taste (and I've used industry-leading ones in work settings that process millions of reads a day).

So instead, I made a very simple UI where you just key in the amount (literally 5 keystrokes on average per image) and it finds the matching charge (or hit enter to instantly cycle through all matches). I've done bookeeping/taxes that way for a decade and keying has never been the bottleneck.

Recently I realized Amazon accounts for around a third of my credit card charges, by volume (yikes!). Unfortunately their transactions are more difficult to reconcile as portions of orders are charged piecemeal as they ship. Further, their webpage that is supposed to list your credit card charges with the matching order numbers is broken (lots of data missing - have reproduced and filed a bug report with their exec team which is still being worked on a month later).

So I wrote another tool. You download your order data and invoices via a personal data request, and it goes out and reconciles all of them. I wind up with a nice spreadsheet i can scroll around in, and whenever the cursor hits a row with an Amazon charge all the paperwork along with a generated order summary (granular down to the shipments and items) comes up on the screen to the right.

Pretty slick. And took less time to code up than his vibecoded project (but hats off to him anyway, sounds like a nice little project to hone your AI skills on). Sometimes these simple little bespoke tools are a far superior "productivity force multiplier" than fancy, generic commercial equivalents.