Inspiration
The inspiration for this project was keeping track of my spending to see where I could cut down and spend less. This tool would prove useful to college students who are constantly penny pinching and would allow them to take a hard look at their budget and where they can cut down.
What it does
This application, at the moment, can take a picture of a receipt and return how much the user spent at the specific store. Additionally, the website is mostly built out, with the front-end completed. The backend portion, using Firebase, is not fully complete. Authentication and reading from the database have to be implemented.
How we built it
I built this application by first wireframing and making the figma. Afterwards, I looked for software or API's online that could take images and return the words on that image. I found a python library called Pytesseract and used it to parse information in receipts. Through the receipts, I found the price of the expenses. After this, I built out all five pages of the website as well as the navbar and began to work on the backend using Firebase.
Challenges we ran into
Some of the challenges I ran into include connecting Firebase to the application. I really struggled with learning firebase and creating functions for user authentication. Additionally, I struggled with making the receipt print out the information I wanted. Often times, pytesseract would print out the information in the receipt poorly, making a surefire algorithm that repeatedly produced the highest price difficult. This issue was solved with finding where the word total or balance appeared and returning the value that followed it.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I'm proud that each individual part of the project works. The website and receipt reader are functional. I am also proud that I was able to make such a large website with so many pages and learn the basics of figma. I am proud I was able to make such a large website on my own.
What we learned
I learned how to use figma and firebase. I still need to continue to sharpen my skills and hopefully I can connect my code to the backend on firebase and get it to work.
What's next for Receiptify
The immediate next objective for receiptify would be to get the firebase up and working. After that, it would be to create my own OCR to read images and extract the text better than pytesseract. Then I would also perfect the algorithm for extracting the total price, the place of expenditure and the date.
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