Inspiration
As students, we lose track of small purchases: coffee, food delivery, subscriptions we forgot about. Budgeting apps ask you to tag every transaction yourself, so most people quit after a week. We wanted an assistant that does the boring part for you and just tells you what to change.
What it does
ReceiptMind lets you snap a photo of a receipt or upload a bank statement. The AI:
- Reads and pulls out every item, price, merchant and date
- Sorts the spending into categories automatically (food, transport, subscriptions, etc.)
- Spots wasted spending, like repeat subscriptions, impulse buys and price spikes
- Builds a simple weekly budget and gives plain-English tips, e.g. "You spent $42 on delivery this week; cooking twice would save about $25."
How we built it
- Frontend: React web app with photo upload
- Backend: Python (FastAPI)
- AI: OCR and a vision-language model to read receipts; an LLM to categorize spending and write budget tips; a model fine-tuned with Tinker (Thinking Machines) to sort categories more accurately
- Data: PDF/CSV parsing for bank statements, stored in a lightweight database
- Hosting: Google Cloud
Challenges we ran into
- Receipts are messy: crumpled paper, faded ink and different layouts for every store
- Every bank formats its statements differently
- Keeping the AI's tips specific and useful instead of generic
- Treating financial data privately and securely
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- An end-to-end flow from a receipt photo to a personalized budget
- Spending categories that come out right without manual tagging
- Advice that feels like a friend helping you, not a spreadsheet
What we learned
- How to combine computer vision and LLMs in one pipeline
- Prompt design and fine-tuning for structured financial data
- Clean, simple UX matters as much as the AI does
What's next for ReceiptMind
- Securely link bank accounts directly
- Shared budgets for roommates
- Savings goals and smart alerts
- A mobile app with instant receipt scanning
Built With
- computer-vision
- fastapi
- google-cloud
- javascript
- llm
- ocr
- openai
- pandas
- python
- react
- tesseract
- tinker
