Receiptify

Connecting people and small businesses through digital receipts!

Comment

Inspiration

Each year in the U.S., up to 10 million trees are used to make paper for receipts. And 21 billion gallons of water are used. The annual waste from receipts in the U.S. is 686 million pounds of waste. Skipping receipts would save 12 billion pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2), the equivalent of one million cars on the road.

What if we could tackle this problem, while also helping out small businesses and their customers?

What it does

That's where Receiptify comes in. We connect small businesses and customers through receipts! We make receipts more than just a record. They're also a way to stay in contact with small businesses, and continue to visit their stores. In essence, Receiptify aims to be much more than a receipt.

Receiptify is a digital receipt platform powered by QR codes that benefits both small businesses and customers, while also avoiding the waste created by paper receipts. Using the app, small businesses can add their inventory to Receiptify, and at checkout, they can select the items a customer ordered and generate a receipt as a QR code. The business can add a coupon to the receipt to encourage the customer to come back again. Then the customer, using the Receiptify app, can scan the QR code and instantly get the receipt directly within the app. The customer can also present receipts and coupons as QR codes for the businesses to scan for return and future purchases. But the receipts do more than that.

The app allows customers to connect with their favorite businesses quickly, receiving updates and announcements through the app. When a customer receives a receipt, they get the option to subscribe to the business and see announcements made by them. Of course, coupons and killer deals naturally follow suit, all of which follow and are accessible from a single transaction, a single receipt. Meanwhile, smaller businesses gain access to better outreach, which would difficult otherwise; after all, people are far less likely to frequent the emails or website of a local business, should they exist at all. But a one-stop shop for all their needs? Now that's business.

How we built it

Receiptify consists of a backend and frontend.

Backend: Using Express.JS, Node.js, and MongoDB, we created a secure API that manages receipts and subscriptions, hosted using Heroku. When a business creates a receipt, the backend associates a unique identifier with it (hash) and stores it in the database. This hash is then embedded in a QR code, and when a customer scans the QR code, they retrieve the hash and use it to fetch the receipt from the backend. The backend maintains the receipt hashes and subscription for each customer. It also handles messaging, receiving announcements from the business and sending them to all subscribed customers.

Frontend: Using Flutter, we made a cross-platform application that runs on iOS, Android, and the web! The app has different features for customers vs businesses. When first opening the app, you select which one you are. Businesses can add inventory, create receipts, scan customer receipts/coupons, and make announcements using the app. Customers can scan receipts and see a list of all of them, and also manage subscriptions and see business announcements.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into some problems while integrating the Flutter app with the API. We had some issues sending JSONs and parsing them correctly, and some infinite load times that were hard to fix, but we eventually ironed out those bugs. The UI was challenging to make and was very time-consuming.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of how well we collaborated together to get this pretty large project done in the time constraints. We made a fully-functioning API that can handle multiple customers and businesses without running into errors. The app itself has a really polished UI and works well with the backend.

What we learned

We learned how to use QR codes to embed and transfer data between devices.

What's next for Receiptify

People probably still have a ton of paper receipts lying around still. We want to address that as well. Receiptify will use machine learning and OCR to scan paper receipts and digitize them. We're also gonna expand the social features to improve the connectivity between customers and small businesses.

Links

Backend: https://github.com/Pranav-V/receiptify Frontend: https://github.com/srujanm111/receiptify

Share this project:

Updates