Family receipt sharing — what my partner and I actually do

This one is less a tutorial than a description of what works in our household. Take what's useful; ignore the rest.

One inbox, both of us

We share a single rct-keep account. The forwarding address is set up as a Gmail rule on both our personal inboxes, so any receipt that hits either of us gets pulled in. The reason we don't keep separate accounts is that "whose receipt is whose" almost never matters when reviewing them — what matters is "did we already buy this", "what did we spend on the kids' stuff this term", and "is this for tax".

If we did our taxes wildly differently — one of us a sole trader, one PAYG with no deductions — that calculus might shift. As is, the unified view wins.

Tag the things only one of us claims

The exception: tax-deductible expenses go on the return of whoever incurred them. So we tag those receipts with a name (jess, chris) at the time. Two seconds. Tax-time export filters by tag and we each get our own subset.

Same goes for receipts from work travel, gym memberships, professional registrations — anything where ownership matters for an external purpose.

The kids' expenses are their own bucket

Childcare receipts (for the rebate), school fees, after-school activities, uniforms, the lot — they live under a "kids" category. Easier to total at end of financial year, easier to argue with Centrelink if anything ever needs cross-referencing, and a small dose of "wow, that's where the money goes" perspective every couple of months.

Groceries are dull and that's fine

We don't agonise over individual grocery receipts. They go into "Groceries", we don't tag them, we don't categorise the line items. Once a quarter we look at the total and have a brief, slightly resigned conversation about it. That's enough granularity for our purposes.

If you're trying to track macros or train spending or something more specific, the line-item tags will help you. We're not.

What we don't do

We don't try to "settle up" between each other based on receipts. The mental overhead of figuring out who owes whom for which Coles run isn't worth the few dollars it might surface. The point of the receipts is having them, not adversarial accounting.

We also don't share login credentials with extended family. The data is too varied, the access too hard to pull back later. If a parent or sibling wants to do this for themselves, they get their own account.

One nice side-effect

The "everything in one place" version means we can answer questions like "when did we buy that table" or "what did the camp trailer cost" two years later, in seconds, without arguing about whose email it was in. That's worth more than the time it takes to set the rule up.