Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 48 posts

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

#32

Post by tga »

Karunamon wrote: post #10

+1 for this question, especially if the folks here know anything about a decent document management system that's both cross-platform and made for home users. The scanner is the eaisest part of the discussion.

If you can live with some manual work and no OCR, the digital version of a filing cabinet is scanning everything as (multi-page) PDFs and naming the files like "2018-07-24 #invoice #ACME #business.pdf". Then you can easily find the right document with just Spotlight or similar. Fully cross platform and likely to be readable by any device now and in the future.

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

#33

Post by WorldMaker »

I used Shoeboxed [1] for about a year several years back. Really loved their service and they have great tech (they were pulling a remarkable amount of data out of most receipts, even years ago when I last used the service). I haven't convinced myself that I need the service enough to budget for rejoining it, but every so often I'm reminded of how useful it was as a service and debate it.

[1] https://www.shoeboxed.com/

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

#34

Post by d0m »

I take a picture of my receipts and email them to a specific email, my accountant then make sure it's valid (etc.) and then process it in their software. Really not that expensive and it's one of those things that I'd rather do the moment I receive a receipt to avoid stacking them. Also, it's one of those things that I really want to delegate to a professional so I'm happy to pay for that service.

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

#36

Post by fideaux64 »

_ah wrote: post #4

A full-duplex scanner is worth the investment. I've configured mine so that it automatically drops the file on a network share for storage. Receipts I ignore (the credit card transaction is caught by my online budgeting service). Random bills / statements get uploaded to Google Drive. There's a "silent OCR" that runs on the PDFs... you can't access the text directly or by API, but if you search for anything it will a…

I adore my Fujitsu. What OCR software are you using?

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

#37

Post by _ah »

fideaux64 wrote: post #36
_ah wrote: post #4

A full-duplex scanner is worth the investment. I've configured mine so that it automatically drops the file on a network share for storage. Receipts I ignore (the credit card transaction is caught by my online budgeting service). Random bills / statements get uploaded to Google Drive. There's a "silent OCR" that runs on the PDFs... you can't access the text directly or by API, but if you search for anything it will a…

I adore my Fujitsu. What OCR software are you using?

That's the point... I don't use any. Google just runs its OCR magic on uploaded docs and makes them searchable.

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

#38

Post by dhruvkar »

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #6

For the hardware side, I use a Fujitsu ScanSnap - I believe my model is an S1300i - to scan paper documents. I use the bundled OCR software (ABBYY FineReader) which seems to work fairly well, though it's highly dependent on the resolution you scan at. As for software, I haven't found anything I'm truly happy with. I've put some effort into using Mayan EDMS[0] to store the documents. It works well, but isn't perfect.…

+1 for Fujitsu ScanSnap

I believe mine is the same model. Small enough to be portable.

Post reply on HN