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Logging Purchases

This is the core workflow in Backscene. A Purchase represents one transaction — a receipt, a logged expense — and it's where most of your day-to-day time will go.

Starting a new purchase

From a project, click Log a Purchase. You'll choose one of two paths:

Upload a receipt

Drop in a photo of a receipt, then click Analyze. Backscene's AI reads the document and extracts the vendor, date, total amount, and individual line items. OCR is Lite and above — see Receipt OCR for supported formats, the review flow, and plan gating.

Once analysis finishes, you'll see a split-screen review: the receipt image stays visible on one side while the parsed information sits on the other. This is intentional — you should be able to glance at the original receipt while you're checking or correcting what the AI pulled out, especially for line items, without losing sight of the source document. While the AI is still processing, you'll see a loading state on the fields it's about to fill in.

Check every field against the receipt. AI parsing is good but not infallible — vendor names, totals, and especially line item splits are worth a second look before you confirm.

Enter manually

No receipt, lost the receipt, or working from memory — this path is fully supported and not a fallback. Use it when:

  • You don't have a physical or digital receipt
  • You're logging something after the fact and just remember the rough total
  • You want to log one expensive item quickly without itemizing everything

The manual form asks for the basics — vendor, amount, date, location — and line items are optional, tucked behind an "Add line items" toggle if you want to break things down further. A vendor and total logged from memory is genuinely more useful than nothing, so don't feel like you need a complete record to make an entry worth creating.

Filling out the purchase

Whichever path you take, you'll be working with the same fields:

  • Vendor — pick from your org's Vendors Library, or add a new one inline by typing a name
  • Date — defaults to today, editable
  • Location — optional, links the purchase to a Location in your library
  • Scenes — optional, link the purchase to one or more Scenes in the current project
  • Payment source — if your org tracks payment methods (cards, accounts), select which one was used
  • Line items — the individual things bought, each with a name, quantity, and unit price

A purchase doesn't require a location or scenes to be valid — those are there for when you want richer reporting later, not because they're mandatory.

Reviewing before you submit

Before anything is created, you'll land on a summary screen. This shows everything you've entered — vendor, total, location, scenes, line item count and subtotal, and the receipt thumbnail if you uploaded one — in a read-only view.

If something's off, use Back to edit to return to the form without losing any of your entered data. Nothing gets created until you explicitly confirm from this screen.

If your line item totals don't match the receipt's stated total, you'll see a warning here — this is the last checkpoint to catch a typo or a missed line item before the purchase is logged.

After you submit

You'll land directly on the purchase's detail page. From there you can:

  • Add or edit line items
  • Edit any of the purchase's fields
  • Mark the purchase as reconciled
  • Delete the purchase, if you have permission to

Per-purchase reconcile works on Lite and above from the purchase detail page. On Studio, org admins can also clear pending and flagged purchases across projects and platforms in Bulk Reconciliation from the Organization Hub.

Items inside a purchase

Line items on a purchase are Item records — name, quantity, unit price, optional tags. Items can also exist without a purchase; see Items for standalone items, tags, and the Items tab.

Tags on items are edited from the item's own detail page, not from a list view — this keeps list views fast to scan and avoids accidental edits while you're just browsing.