Bill Samurai

Motivation

In the world where eating together has become a norm, diners are often faced with a phenomenon called Diners' Dilemma. It refers to a situation where diners agree to divide the bill evenly before ordering their meals. The process is financially unfair, especially for the person ordering less expensive meals. This dilemma is often avoided by agreeing to pay only for the items that each respective diner’s orders. Most groups would choose a person to pay in advance, and the rest of the group would then pay back the original payer. This process is called bill-splitting.

If done manually, bill-splitting is painstaking as the person needs to identify each diner’s items, sum the amount, calculate the GST and service charges, and keep track whether each diner has transferred the correct amount to the person. Moreover, bill-splitting is very slow, especially if the group is large, because the process has to be done repeatedly for each person’s order. Therefore, our motivation for this project is to make bill-splitting effortless and quick.

Benchmarking Analysis

Currently, there exist some bill-splitting app in the market, namely Splitwise, SettleUp, and Line Split Bill. However, there are still some issues with these apps. Firstly, some bill-splitting apps may not offer the ability to scan receipts as a way for users to input the details of their expenses into the app. This is tedious as users need to type in the items in the receipt one by one, which may cause bill splitting with the app as painstaking and slow as without the app. Secondly, some bill-splitting apps like Line Split Bill may not offer the ability to connect to users' bank accounts or payment systems, such as PayPal or PayLah!, to facilitate the transfer of funds between users. This is inconvenient and prone to errors as users need to key in the amount they need to transfer manually.

Therefore, our goal is to improve existing bill-splitting apps by streamlining all processes of bill-splitting, ranging from inputting data, cost calculation, and payment transfers, into one seamless process.

Solution

We would like to build a comprehensive split-bill app called Bill Samurai. Using our split-bill app, the users will be able to:

Take a picture of the physical receipt which will be processed by the app
Key in the people who ordered certain items from our contact list
Send payment requests to respective diners
Transfer payments using payment app linked to the split-bill app
Display status bars to keep track who has transferred their payments

One thing to note is that although the bill-splitting app was inspired by the diners’ dilemma, the app can be extended to a variety of contexts outside of diners, such as supermarket receipts.

How we built it

Frontend and backend of the mobile app will be built using React Native JS.
Machine Learning in the form of optical character recognition (OCR) will be used to scan the receipt, clean the image, do text recognition, and determine the shop’s name, the items, the prices, quantities, and any charges. We will use Python OpenCV, pytesseract, and Imaging libary for that
Paylah API will be used to integrate our applciation with one of the common payment method in Singapore
MongoDB will be used for database management

What's next for Bill Samurai

09 Jan - 15 Jan Our team will start building a prototype of the application, as well as doing technical knowledge research about the tech stack that we will use. After that, we will start on the Deployement of the API.

16 Jan - 26 Jan Our team will continue building the application and finalising the Deployement of the API.