Ask HN: How do you OCR your receipts and bills in 2018? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How do you OCR your receipts and bills in 2018?

#21

Post by owenversteeg » Tue, Jul 24, 2018, 2:51 PM UTC

What about plain old store reciepts? Like on little scraps of thermal paper. What do you all do with those?

Re: Ask HN: How do you OCR your receipts and bills in 2018?

#22

Post by jonheller » Tue, Jul 24, 2018, 2:52 PM UTC

Surprised to still see so much hardware usage -- I'm curious where people find the advantages there?

I have found over the past few years paper recognition in iOS apps works great, both third party like JotNot as well as what Apple introduced last iOS update.

For workflow I use one of those options and then share with Dropbox, and then store those files in a encrypted disk image in Dropbox.

Re: Ask HN: How do you OCR your receipts and bills in 2018?

#23

Post by smnv » Tue, Jul 24, 2018, 2:55 PM UTC

Most receipts in my country have a qr code at the bottom with the link to the receipt in human and machine readable format. In the next year this will be mandatory for everyone. Russia.

Re: Ask HN: How do you OCR your receipts and bills in 2018?

#24

Post by savant_d » Tue, Jul 24, 2018, 3:00 PM UTC

In Russia we have qr codes on receipts

http://www.itpremier.org/admin/ckfinder/userfiles/images/XMU...

Re: Ask HN: How do you OCR your receipts and bills in 2018?

#25

Post by jjeaff » Tue, Jul 24, 2018, 3:01 PM UTC

savant_d wrote: post #24

In Russia we have qr codes on receipts http://www.itpremier.org/admin/ckfinder/userfiles/images/XMU...

That is an excellent idea. I hope it catches on in the US.

Re: Ask HN: How do you OCR your receipts and bills in 2018?

#26

Post by jdc » Tue, Jul 24, 2018, 3:03 PM UTC

I use the Microsoft Office Lens Android app. It uploads to OneDrive, which has a pretty basic UI, but a quick full+text search.

Re: Ask HN: How do you OCR your receipts and bills in 2018?

#27

Post by eastendguy » Tue, Jul 24, 2018, 3:03 PM UTC

I don't have that many. But when I need to OCR a receipt or in general get text from an image, I use the Copyfish extension and then copy & paste from there to the accounting software:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/copyfish-ocr-...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/copyfish-%F0%9F%90...

Re: Ask HN: How do you OCR your receipts and bills in 2018?

#28

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, Jul 24, 2018, 3:05 PM UTC

smnv wrote: post #23

Most receipts in my country have a qr code at the bottom with the link to the receipt in human and machine readable format. In the next year this will be mandatory for everyone. Russia.

I was going to ask, who came up with a dumb idea of using a link (i.e. URL) to access receipt data over the Internet, but fortunately it seems to not be the case - the QR code on the receipt posted by 'savant_d[0] reads:

  t=20170221T095900&s=30.00&fn=99990789659&i=501&fp=4189225230&n=1

--

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17601617

Re: Ask HN: How do you OCR your receipts and bills in 2018?

#29

Post by wrb » Tue, Jul 24, 2018, 3:07 PM UTC

I created Smart Receipts for receipt tracking and OCR a few years ago. I worked as a traveling consultant and needed to track receipts on a weekly basis, and I got tired of manually typing in the data.

It's available on both Android and iOS for download here:

https://smartreceipts.co/download

It's also open source:

https://github.com/wbaumann/SmartReceiptsLibrary https://github.com/wbaumann/SmartReceiptsiOS

Re: Ask HN: How do you OCR your receipts and bills in 2018?

#30

Post by michaelt » Tue, Jul 24, 2018, 3:08 PM UTC

owenversteeg wrote: post #21

What about plain old store reciepts? Like on little scraps of thermal paper. What do you all do with those?

I can't imagine a scenario where I'd have to prove that I brought, say, a donut.

So 98% of store receipts go straight in the trash. Before I've even left the store, if possible.