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Splitjar

Reply-to-edit

When a receipt lands in needs_review (or needs_confirmation for a duplicate), Splitjar emails you. That email is reply-able. Your reply is the edit.

The shape

Reply with whatever feels natural:

  • “split 3 ways between me, Rod and Steve”
  • “vendor is actually Soko Coffee”
  • “amount was 42.50 GEL”
  • “category is groceries”
  • “this is fine, approve it”

A small model reads the receipt’s current state plus your reply and produces a tight JSON patch. Allowed fields:

  • vendor, category, country_code
  • amount, currency, purchased_at, notes
  • split_policy and member assignments

Anything else is ignored.

Cloudflare Email Routing doesn’t support RFC 5233 sub-addressing, so we can’t put the receipt id in the local part of the reply address. Instead, the body of every review email carries a marker:

Ref: SJ-<receiptId>-<HMAC token>

Most clients quote the body on reply, so the marker comes back to us. The HMAC token is verified server-side before any edit is applied — a forwarded copy of the email can’t be replayed by an attacker who doesn’t hold the secret.

Who can reply

The reply must come from a verified alias of a member of the jar. Two checks:

  1. The From: address is mapped to a users.id via the user_emails table, AND that mapping has verified_at IS NOT NULL.
  2. That user is a member of the receipt’s jar.

A placeholder invitee whose email was added during invite does have a user_emails row, but that row’s verified_at is NULL until they sign in. They can’t edit by reply alone.

What you get back

If the patch parses cleanly and applies, you get a confirmation email with a one-line summary of what changed. If the model couldn’t make sense of the reply, you get a “couldn’t parse” email asking for a sharper version. The receipt stays in needs_review either way until the change actually lands.

Why this exists

The product is built for the on-holiday-half-drunk use case. Opening an app to fix a vendor name on a single receipt is friction. Replying to an email isn’t.