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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

Section titled “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.

Section titled “How the link back works”

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

Section titled “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

Section titled “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

Section titled “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.