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I'm working on a receipt-saving service for small businesses/freelancers: https://receiptron.com/ https://receiptron.com/ The goal is to make it the easiest wa

I'm working on a receipt-saving service for small businesses/freelancers: https://receiptron.com/ https://receiptron.com/ The goal is to make it the easiest way to save receipts. No app to install, no complicated expense report forms to fill out, just take a picture of the receipt with your phone camera, email it to our specially-trained robots, and it gets saved and sorted for you for later.

Omnipresent 11y ago
This is neat. Are you using OCR to extract data from receipts?
- DanHulton 11y ago
  Nope, just a specially-formed subject line at this stage. OCR is a neat idea, but I'm trying to do the "launch quickly, figure out the market, build features based on actual customer interest" thing. OCR would be fun to do, but very error-prone, very hard, and not necessarily proven to add as much value as a whole bunch of other ideas that are on the backburner as well.
tolu_olubode 11y ago
Sounds pretty cool actually!
RussianCow 11y ago
This is absolutely brilliant! I might sign up just for my own personal use. That said, when I was a contractor, I would've paid double that for a service like this--if this works as well as it claims, the amount of time saved during tax season would more than justify $100 a year. Edit: Never mind, I thought this worked using OCR. It's still a cool service, but I wrote this comment under that assumption, so unfortunately I'm a little less excited about it.
- DanHulton 11y ago
  It's still early days. Do me a favour? Let me know: if it worked via OCR, what important information would you want it to pull out? And if I do get that in there, would you want me to let you know?
  - RussianCow 11y ago
    Yeah, that's totally fair, I just got overly excited. Even just the total would be awesome. I don't mind entering metadata manually, and looking through a picture of the receipt for each line item if I need to do that, but I've love it to automatically capture the total so I can see those at a glance without manually inputting them. Maybe the date, too, but that's less important if I can just take the photo as soon as I get the receipt. (Getting the vendor would be doubly awesome, but I know that would be nearly impossible, so I wouldn't ever expect that.) I wrote a web app to do this for myself when I was contracting, but I had to manually enter the vendor, total amount, and date for each receipt, which got really tedious. (The process wasn't fast enough that I would do it on the move, so I saved up receipts and did them in batches, which took a lot of time.) I'd love to just be able to take a picture and enter some metadata (probably just vendor and category) and have at least the total be pulled from the receipt, and the date either pulled or defaulted to today's date. Yes, please let me know if you ever implement OCR! And feel free to contact me directly in general. My email is sasha1rus@gmail.com. In the meantime, I'm going to give this a try as-is. Thank you!
joeseeder 11y ago
Ha, i've done something similar. It's dirt simple , you put total price and categories / tags in the subject of the email ( because you are much more accurate than any OCR, and doing 1 receipt at a time it's not even noticeable work ), and attach a picture/pdf or the expense. then i have a ruby script which connect to the imap account, creates reports based on sender and tags, including attachments in the breakdown. Simple and effective.

Omnipresent 11y ago

This is neat. Are you using OCR to extract data from receipts?

DanHulton 11y ago
Nope, just a specially-formed subject line at this stage. OCR is a neat idea, but I'm trying to do the "launch quickly, figure out the market, build features based on actual customer interest" thing. OCR would be fun to do, but very error-prone, very hard, and not necessarily proven to add as much value as a whole bunch of other ideas that are on the backburner as well.

tolu_olubode 11y ago

Sounds pretty cool actually!

RussianCow 11y ago

This is absolutely brilliant! I might sign up just for my own personal use. That said, when I was a contractor, I would've paid double that for a service like this--if this works as well as it claims, the amount of time saved during tax season would more than justify $100 a year. Edit: Never mind, I thought this worked using OCR. It's still a cool service, but I wrote this comment under that assumption, so unfortunately I'm a little less excited about it.

DanHulton 11y ago
It's still early days. Do me a favour? Let me know: if it worked via OCR, what important information would you want it to pull out? And if I do get that in there, would you want me to let you know?
- RussianCow 11y ago
  Yeah, that's totally fair, I just got overly excited. Even just the total would be awesome. I don't mind entering metadata manually, and looking through a picture of the receipt for each line item if I need to do that, but I've love it to automatically capture the total so I can see those at a glance without manually inputting them. Maybe the date, too, but that's less important if I can just take the photo as soon as I get the receipt. (Getting the vendor would be doubly awesome, but I know that would be nearly impossible, so I wouldn't ever expect that.) I wrote a web app to do this for myself when I was contracting, but I had to manually enter the vendor, total amount, and date for each receipt, which got really tedious. (The process wasn't fast enough that I would do it on the move, so I saved up receipts and did them in batches, which took a lot of time.) I'd love to just be able to take a picture and enter some metadata (probably just vendor and category) and have at least the total be pulled from the receipt, and the date either pulled or defaulted to today's date. Yes, please let me know if you ever implement OCR! And feel free to contact me directly in general. My email is sasha1rus@gmail.com. In the meantime, I'm going to give this a try as-is. Thank you!

joeseeder 11y ago

Ha, i've done something similar. It's dirt simple , you put total price and categories / tags in the subject of the email ( because you are much more accurate than any OCR, and doing 1 receipt at a time it's not even noticeable work ), and attach a picture/pdf or the expense. then i have a ruby script which connect to the imap account, creates reports based on sender and tags, including attachments in the breakdown. Simple and effective.