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Comment by graphe | Hacker News Reader

Nextcloud also has OCR. You can use a scanner with either.

Avoid touching the receipts. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5453537/

didn't see anything specifically receipt oriented but found a little blurb here that mentions receipts almost tangentially https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/usage/#basic-searching

I run paperless on an Unraid server at home and it works really well. It has "machine learning" (based on a model that you host yourself that grows as you use it). It has good search, impressive OCR, and generally works really well.

My only complaint is that it lacks a good organization workflow. I have a shared network folder and any file (image, pdf, etc) that you put on that folder gets immediately consumed into Paperless. This happens almost immediately. I have a printer/scanner that allows me to scan to a SMB network drive. So I configured any scans from it to go to that shared folder, which makes integration really nice. I also use GeniusScan on my phone to scan to the same network drive (which requires pro, which is ~$16 a year I think). Genius Scan can save locally to your phone and upload later when you get home, which makes for a good workflow. The problem is that once it gets into Paperless, there's not a good workflow for reviewing and labeling the file. I have been meaning to sit down and provide a contribution to the open source project to improve this, but haven't found the time to do it yet. This is the biggest weakness of the project imo.

For those that have never used paperless. The naming may confuse you. It started off as an open source project named paperless. Then it got abandoned and a team picked it up to update it and make it more modern, and they renamed it paperless-ng (for angular I assume, the new frontend). Then that project lost momentum, so it was forked again and is now paperless-ngx which is the current iteration of it. It currently has a very strong community and gets good updates.

hmm, I guess I have a weekend project now.

And thanks for the heads up about the toxicity, I use to save them all but after the move I simply take a picture with my phone and throw them out.

paperless doesn't seem to be my exact use case but hopefully after it does the OCR transformation it can allow you to make a csv file.

I'd look into a document scanner for ease of use. They even have ones that auto loads, so no more waiting around. With that said, if you purchase a scanner, it probably already has proprietary OCR, and they have auto feeding ones for many documents. I foolishly bought one not knowing auto feeding was an option. https://youtu.be/fi0ZhTFaW7w I bought a brother 2 sided one since it had Linux drivers.

hmm, IDK if a scanner would help me. I already have pictures of my receipts. I might have to do more research because I feel like there's gotta be something out there where you can just show images of receipts and have it generate a csv of the data.

I'd even pay a decent amount to do it. After doing some more research it seems like MS Office might handle this workflow too in Excel (convert receipt picture to csv data).

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