Flashstub
Privacy policy
Your receipts stay yours.
Flashstub photographs receipts, reads them, and files them as expenses. This policy explains what the app keeps, where it keeps it, and the few things it ever sends off your phone. The short version: everything you put in stays on your iPhone.
What Flashstub stores on your iPhone
- Receipt images you capture or pick from your photo library, and the crop the app straightened.
- What it read from each receipt: store, address, total, date, category, and, when printed, tax, tip and line items.
- Expenses: whether each is personal, business or billable to a client, and the client's name.
- Where a receipt was scanned (coordinates), if you allow location while using the app, so it can be matched to a client's place.
- Drives, if you turn on mileage tracking: start and end, the route, distance, and how you classified them.
- Client places: a client's name and the location the app learned for them, and the home location it inferred or you confirmed.
- Settings such as your default payer, your mileage rate and whether you downloaded the reader model.
All of this lives in the app's private storage on your device. Flashstub has no user accounts, no servers of its own and no cloud sync. The developer cannot see any of it.
What Flashstub never does
- Upload your receipts, expenses, client names, location or drives anywhere.
- Collect analytics, crash reports or usage statistics.
- Show ads or use advertising identifiers.
- Track you across other apps or websites.
- Sell, rent or share your data with anyone.
How receipts are read
Reading happens on the device using Apple's text recognition and Live Text. On iPhones with Apple Intelligence, Apple's on-device language model may read the recognised text (never the image) to fill in a field the reader missed. Nothing is sent to Apple or anyone else for this.
On iPhones without Apple Intelligence, Settings offers a small open reader model (about 0.9 GB). If you choose to download it, the app fetches the model files once from Hugging Face, a public model host. That download carries no receipt data or personal information; Hugging Face sees only an ordinary file request from your phone, governed by its own privacy policy. Once downloaded, the model runs entirely on your iPhone.
The federal mileage rate
To price business drives, Flashstub can look up the current federal mileage rate from gsa.gov, a U.S. government website. This is a plain page fetch, at most once a day, and carries nothing about you or your drives beyond the ordinary network request. You can turn it off and enter your own rate in Settings; a built-in rate is used if the lookup is unavailable.
Device permissions and why
- Camera: to photograph receipts. Frames are processed on the device.
- Photo Library: to let you pick an existing receipt image. Only the image you choose is read.
- Location while using the app: to note where a receipt was scanned and suggest the client. Stored on the phone only.
- Location always, and Motion & Fitness: only if you turn on automatic drive detection. Motion activity tells driving from walking; GPS is recorded only while you are driving. Drives are stored on the phone only. With "While Using" location, drives are detected only while the app is open.
- Microphone and Speech Recognition: to dictate a client's name. Speech is converted to text by Apple's Speech framework, which may process audio on Apple's servers under Apple's privacy policy. Flashstub keeps only the resulting name.
Every permission is optional and can be changed at any time in the iPhone Settings app. The app keeps working with typed input and manual drives.
Maps
Drive routes are shown on Apple Maps inside the app. Displaying a map loads map tiles from Apple; your route itself is drawn on the phone and is not sent anywhere.
Exporting a report
Settings → Export Expenses as PDF creates a report on the device and hands it to the iOS share sheet. What happens next is up to you and the app you share it with. Flashstub does not send the report anywhere itself.
Deleting your data
Open an expense and tap Delete Expense to remove it and its receipt image. Swipe a client in Settings → Clients to forget a learned place. Deleting the app removes everything Flashstub stored.
Children
Flashstub is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect information from them.
Changes to this policy
If a future version of Flashstub handles information differently, this page will be updated and the effective date above will change. Material changes will also be noted in the App Store release notes.
Contact
Questions about privacy: support@flashstub.com.