PTA fu: receipt simplification

General
1

Seen on the net:

To make my life easier, when I check out at a store, I put all my grocery items first on the belt. Then everything else. Usually "everything else" is only a few items. So I categorize those additional items, and then specify "Groceries" for the rest.
Often I buy only groceries, and I throw those receipts away. When I'm in a ledger/beancount session, if I don't have a receipt, that means it was just Groceries.
This method alone really reduced my time dealing with receipts.

— My Beancount books are 95% automatic after 3 years (2024) | Hacker News

2

I started doing basically this a couple years ago. I tend to order my purchases, but don't expect others to do the same, although that makes it easier to sort the receipts. The checkers don't always run them through in the order I expect, anyway, so I prefer to not count on that.

This time compression is a tiny bit lossy, though. If a receipt is actually missing, in this method, I assume it's groceries instead of searching for it, but for general purposes, it seems good enough.