Price Tracking
Attaching a label to a product variety and pointing a reader channel at numerics turns price logging from a four-tap task into no task at all.
Logging a price in the Casabeza numerics app takes four taps: open the app, find the item, select the variety, enter the cost. That's genuinely fast compared to any spreadsheet workflow — but it still requires you to stop what you're doing, unlock your phone, navigate, and type a number.
Four taps is low enough that most people will do it some of the time. It's not low enough that most people will do it every time. And price tracking is only useful when it's consistent. A history with gaps doesn't tell you whether prices have trended up — it tells you that you logged it some months and not others.
The numerics reader closes that gap.
Every numeric variety in Casabeza can have a label attached to it — the same label system used for inventory items. A 500ml bottle of washing-up liquid is a variety. That bottle already has a barcode on it. Scan it once to register the UPC with the variety, and every future scan of that product — on any reader, with any scanner — is already associated. No new labels, no stickers, no extra hardware. The packaging you already have becomes the input.
Now configure a reader channel — on a fixed reader or the Android scanner — with the Numeric Tracking action. When that label passes the reader, the system logs a numeric event for that variety.
The reader knows which variety it scanned. It knows when. The remaining variable is cost — and this is where the workflow splits into two useful modes.
Fixed-price tracking. For items you buy on a regular cadence at a predictable price, the scan alone is enough to register a purchase event. The date, the variety, the reader location — all captured without typing anything.
Prompt-to-enter. For items where the price changes — which is most consumables worth tracking — the scan creates a pending record that surfaces in the numerics app for cost completion. You scan at the shelf, go home, open the app once to fill in that day's prices across everything you scanned. The navigation is already done; you're just entering numbers.
Without the reader, price logging depends on discipline at the point of purchase. You have the product in hand, you know the price, and you need to decide whether to open the app and enter it now or do it later.
"Later" is where records go to die. The price is still in short-term memory at the checkout, but by the time you're home and unpacked it's gone, and the record doesn't get made.
The reader moves the trigger from "remember to log it" to "scan when you put it away." Putting shopping away is a physical action that already happens. The scan becomes a natural part of that action rather than a separate task layered on top of it.
The most powerful configuration is a fixed reader mounted at the pantry, the cleaning supplies cabinet, or wherever consumables are stored. As items come in from a shopping trip, they pass the reader. The reader logs the event automatically — no phone interaction required at all.
This is the same principle as the stock ingress channel for inventory, but applied to price tracking. The scan that registers an item entering storage also creates the numerics event. You complete the cost later in the app, but the item and the date are already captured.
Over time, the reader location builds a complete picture of what came in when. Cross-referenced with price data, it becomes a consumption record: not just what things cost, but how fast you go through them.
What makes this work is that the barcode is registered to the variety, not the item. Casabeza distinguishes between a numeric item (olive oil) and its varieties (500ml, 1L, 3L cold-pressed). The UPC on the specific product you actually buy maps to that specific variety — and the system knows exactly what it represents.
This means the scan carries full context. Not "olive oil was purchased," but "the 500ml Filippo Berio bottle was purchased." The variety-level precision is what makes per-unit cost comparisons meaningful, and it flows automatically from the barcode without any disambiguation at scan time.
Register it once. Every subsequent scan of that product — whether from a phone camera, a fixed reader, or a USB barcode wand — logs correctly, indefinitely.