Kerb 🚗💷
A private, offline-first money & tax tracker for UK self-employed delivery drivers (Amazon Flex, Uber Eats, Deliveroo, Just Eat…).
Kerb works out — to the penny — your income, expenses, allowable deductions, tax, National Insurance, what to keep and what's safe to spend, and it can read your receipts with Claude just by taking a photo. Everything stays on your device.
بالعربي: تطبيق ذكي وخاص لسائقي التوصيل في بريطانيا يعملون لحسابهم الخاص. يحسب لك بالبنس: مدخولك، مصاريفك، الضرائب والتأمين الوطني، صافي أرباحك، كم تحتفظ للضريبة وكم يمكنك أن تصرف — ويقرأ فواتيرك تلقائياً عبر كلود بمجرد تصويرها. كل بياناتك تبقى على جهازك فقط.
✨ Features
- Dashboard — estimated take-home for the tax year, tax to set aside, "safe to spend", last-7-days performance, income mix and recent activity, with employment (PAYE) kept clearly separate from self-employment.
- Scan or upload anything — Claude reads it for you (uses your own Anthropic API key):
- Receipts → amount, date, vendor, category, VAT and every itemised line.
- Earnings statements (Amazon Flex, Uber Eats…) → every shift, from a photo or PDF.
- Bank / card statements → every transaction, auto-sorted into delivery income vs. business expenses for you to confirm.
- Payslips → your PAYE salary, tax and NI, from a photo or PDF.
- Organised Add menu — one + button grouped into Scan or upload, Add manually and Track & ask so every way to add money is one tap away.
- Tax engine (2026/27) — Income Tax, Class 4 & Class 2 NIC, the £1,000 trading allowance, personal-allowance interaction with a PAYE job, and Payments on Account — all computed the way Self Assessment does it.
- Mileage or actual costs — simplified per-mile relief (car 55p/25p, motorcycle 24p, bicycle 20p) with the vehicle-cost rule handled correctly, or actual costs.
- Shift mileage that survives closing the app — clock in with your odometer reading and enter the end reading when you finish (miles = end − start); no need to keep the app open. Live GPS is offered too, but as a web app it only tracks while Kerb is open, so the odometer is the recommended, accurate method.
- Pots — a weekly plan (how much to keep for tax / vehicle / savings vs. spend) and saved-so-far trackers.
- Insights — £/hour, £/mile, £/drop, net £/hour after tax, best weekday, platform comparison and a full-year projection.
- Expense-method advisor — compares simplified mileage vs actual vehicle costs, tells you which leaves a lower tax bill and by how much per year, and switches method in one tap.
- Duplicate protection on import — bank, earnings-statement and CSV imports flag rows that match entries you already have (by date & amount) so the same money is never counted twice.
- Deadlines — countdowns to HMRC registration (5 Oct), filing & payment (31 Jan) and the 2nd payment on account (31 Jul).
- Private & offline — a PWA you install on your phone; all data lives in your browser (IndexedDB). Export/import a JSON backup and CSVs for your accountant.
- App lock (PIN) — optional 4-digit PIN with auto-lock in the background. The PIN is stored only as a salted SHA-256 hash, and is never included in a backup.
- Editable tax rates — every rate/threshold is stored per tax year and editable, so Kerb stays correct as HMRC figures change.
📱 Install on your phone
Kerb is a Progressive Web App — no app store needed.
- Host the folder over HTTPS (see Deploy below) and open it in your phone's browser.
- iPhone (Safari): Share → Add to Home Screen.
Android (Chrome): menu → Install app / Add to Home screen.
- It opens like a normal app, works offline, and keeps its own private storage.
The camera, install and offline features need HTTPS (or localhost). Opening index.html directly from disk won't work — serve it.
🤖 Scanning (Claude)
Scanning reads receipts, earnings statements, bank statements and payslips — from a photo or a PDF — and fills everything in. It works two ways.
Free allowance (no account needed). Out of the box, each device gets a number of free scans per month through Kerb's own endpoint. Nothing to set up. The file passes through that endpoint on its way to Anthropic — see Privacy below.
Your own key (unlimited, nothing passes through us).
- Create an API key at console.anthropic.com → API keys and add a small amount of credit.
- In Kerb: Settings → Receipt scanning → paste the key → Save key → Test.
Your key is stored only on your device, is sent only to Anthropic, and is never included in a backup file. Each scan costs a fraction of a penny.
Quick-add by text and the assistant always need your own key: the shared endpoint accepts documents only, so it can't be used as a general-purpose model.
Hosting the free allowance yourself
The endpoint is api/scan.js, a single serverless function. On Vercel it needs one environment variable:
| Variable | Required | Purpose |
|---|
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY | yes | the key the endpoint spends |
KV_REST_API_URL + KV_REST_API_TOKEN | strongly recommended | shared counters, so quotas hold across instances |
FREE_SCANS_PER_MONTH | no (default 50) | the free monthly allowance per device |
DAILY_REQUEST_CAP | no (default 5000) | hard ceiling on what the endpoint can cost in a day |
Without ANTHROPIC_API_KEY the endpoint returns a clear "not set up" message and the app falls back to asking for your own key — nothing breaks.
Without the KV variables the quotas are per-instance only and reset on every cold start, so the per-device allowance is not really enforced. The daily cap is the protection that still bounds the cost; attach a KV store before relying on the allowance.
What stops the endpoint being used as a free model is api/_validate.js: a request is accepted only if it is exactly one image or PDF plus one instruction, on an allowed model, with a capped reply — no system prompt, no tools, no free-form text. npm run test:api covers what it refuses.
🚀 Deploy (free options)
Any static host works. Two easy ones:
- GitHub Pages: push this repo → Settings → Pages → deploy from the branch, root. Your app is live at
https://<user>.github.io/<repo>/.
- Netlify / Vercel / Cloudflare Pages: drag-and-drop the folder or connect the repo. No build step, no configuration.
There is no build step — it's plain HTML/CSS/JS.
🧑💻 Local development
npm run serve # static dev server at http://localhost:8080
npm run test # tax-engine correctness checks
npm run icons # regenerate app icons
Requires only Node.js (used for the dev server and tooling; the app itself has zero runtime dependencies).
🗂️ Project structure
index.html app shell
manifest.webmanifest PWA manifest
service-worker.js offline caching
css/styles.css light + dark theme
js/
app.js boot, router, navigation, theme
store.js settings + UK tax rate tables (editable)
tax.js the calculation engine
db.js IndexedDB (local storage of entries)
claude.js Anthropic extraction (receipts, earnings, bank, payslips)
charts.js dependency-free SVG charts
util.js formatting, dates, UK tax-year math
ui/ screens: dashboard, income, expenses, tax, pots,
insights, settings, onboarding, forms, shared,
scan-earnings, bank-import, payslips, assistant
icons/ app icon (scalable SVG)
scripts/ dev tooling (server, tests, optional PNG icon generator)
⚠️ Disclaimer
Kerb gives estimates to help you budget and stay organised. It is not tax advice. Always confirm the final figures on your HMRC Self Assessment or with an accountant. Tax rates are seeded for 2026/27 (England/Wales/Northern Ireland) and are editable in Settings; Scottish bands and student-loan thresholds are provided as defaults to verify per year.
🔒 Privacy
- All entries stay in your browser's local database on your device.
- Backups you export are plain files you control; they never include your API key or your PIN.
- An optional PIN lock gates access to the app (stored as a salted SHA-256 hash). It keeps casual snoopers out; it is not full encryption of the data at rest, so keep your phone's own screen lock on too.
- The only network call the app makes is a scan you ask for. With your own key it goes straight to Anthropic. Without one it goes through Kerb's endpoint, which forwards it to Anthropic and returns the result — the file passes through that server, is not stored, and is not used for anything else. Add your own key if you'd rather it never left your device by way of us.
- Only the file you choose to scan is ever sent. Your records, totals and tax figures are not.
License
MIT
