Paperless

An app that strives to eliminate the use and waste of paper by pushing receipts Paperless to your smartphone app.

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Inspiration

For our development team, it pains us to see paper receipts get wasted even after declining to receive the receipts in an in-person transaction. According to treehugger.com, the U.S. uses up to 10 million trees annually to make paper. Among that paper created, 686 million pounds of it end up as waste in the form of receipts at the end of the year. Our project aims to create a more sustainable approach to receipts.

What it does

The goal of this app is to get information from a vendor after a customer makes a transaction and instantly and seamlessly load a digital receipt into the Paperless app.

How we built it

We first got together and devised a plan to use Python, Flask, and React as our stack for this project. We created a database cluster in MongoDB. We simulated transactions being created by making JSON files in the database. We developed the front-end by using react.js. The API calls were hosted by a web sever through Azure.

Challenges we ran into

  • There were a lot of challenges with getting a web server set up, connecting a domain, and hosting the API calls through the domain to be accessible via our front end developer. We tried using Google Cloud Platform, but could not authenticate a public key to ssh to the host name. We then used Amazon-Web-services, but we then were lost with how to speak to MongoDB and also hosting the domain on the web server for the API calls.We were advised to use API Gateway and AWS Lambda but struggled to understand this (as we had reached our 16-hr mark of coding) Eventually, one of our developers got a connection to work between MongoDB and Azure, even without using the domain name. The File type for the receipts themselves were going to be .pdf files. We were able to use fpdf in python to write/create pdf files; however, we could not format them correctly like a receipt so we compromised!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the breakthroughs we were able to figure out alone! For a lot of participants, this was their first Hackathon, and it is astonishing to see what you're capable of creating in such a short time...with little sleep! When it came to the networking side of things, the front-end side, and the back-end side we were there for each other to answer questions, offer advice, and even uplift each other if one of us were frustrated with something. We are proud of the communication we were able to foster and the friendly environment that created for each other.

What we learned

We learned how to generate public and private SSH keys. We got exposure to AWS web service, Google Cloud Platform, how to use pymongo, and how to set up a domain. Lastly, we learned the importance of team work!

What's next for Paperless

Paperless plans to create more user-friendly features. We plan to make the system a resource to manage finances as well.

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