Recibo is an expenses app made in Helsinki for small studios: you photograph a receipt and it files the numbers. The team wanted customers to feel the brand at the moment expenses hurt most, the end of each quarter, when the paperwork is due and someone is hunting for a till slip from March.

A report worth keeping

Every customer gets a printed report each quarter, set like a slim magazine. The cover is the quarter’s number, very large, so a year of issues on a shelf reads like a calendar. Inside are the quarter’s totals, the biggest costs and a page on what changed in the app.

It travels in a plain envelope sized to go through a standard letterbox without folding. Some customers roll theirs and carry it to the accountant, which is roughly what we hoped for.

Folders for the paper that won’t go away

The app keeps the numbers, but many tax offices still want the original slips. So each report arrives with a folder for the coming quarter, marked Q1 to Q4 in the same big type as the covers. A year fits in a wire desk sorter, and a bulging Q2 folder tells you something before you open it.

The full set of printed pieces:

• The quarterly report, 32 pages, with the quarter’s number on the cover.

• Four quarter folders that hold till slips without spilling them.

• A yellow card in every envelope with the quarter’s filing dates.

• Envelopes and business cards for the team.

One paper clip

The mark is a single paper clip, drawn once at a large size and then redrawn by hand for small uses, so it still reads as a clip at 16 pixels on the app icon. It sits on the folder spines and in the corner of every report.

The brand has two colours: violet for the reports and yellow for anything that needs doing. For the launch mailing, an oversized steel clip held the yellow card to each envelope, so the first thing customers touched was the mark itself.