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  Introducing Receipto!

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  Showcase

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  Market Validation

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  Our Product

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  Business Model Canvas: Receipto

Inspiration

As a team we decided to develop a service that we thought would not only be extremely useful to us, but to everyone around the world that struggles with storing physical receipts. We were inspired to build an eco friendly as well as innovative application that targets the pain points behind filing receipts, losing receipts, missing return policy deadlines, not being able to find the proper receipt with a particular item as well as tracking potentially bad spending habits.

What it does

To solve these problems, we are proud to introduce, Receipto, a universal receipt tracker who's mission is to empower users with their personal finances, to track spending habits more easily as well as to replace physical receipts to reduce global paper usage.

With Receipto you can upload or take a picture of a receipt, and it will automatically recognize all of the information found on the receipt. Once validated, it saves the picture and summarizes the data in a useful manner. In addition to storing receipts in an organized manner, you can get valuable information on your spending habits, you would also be able to search through receipt expenses based on certain categories, items and time frames. The most interesting feature is that once a receipt is loaded and validated, it will display a picture of all the items purchased thanks to the use of item codes and an image recognition API. Receipto will also notify you when a receipt may be approaching its potential return policy deadline which is based on a user input during receipt uploads.

How we built it

We have chosen to build Receipto as a responsive web application, allowing us to develop a better user experience. We first drew up story boards by hand to visually predict and explore the user experience, then we developed the app using React, ViteJS, ChakraUI and Recharts.

For the backend, we decided to use NodeJS deployed on Google Cloud Compute Engine. In order to read and retrieve information from the receipt, we used the Google Cloud Vision API along with our own parsing algorithm.

Overall, we mostly focused on developing the main ideas, which consist of scanning and storing receipts as well as viewing the images of the items on the receipts.

Challenges we ran into

Our main challenge was implementing the image recognition API, as it involved a lot of trial and error. Almost all receipts are different depending on the store and province. For example, in Quebec, there are two different taxes displayed on the receipt, and that affected how our app was able to recognize the data. To fix that, we made sure that if two types of taxes are displayed, our app would recognize that it comes from Quebec, and it would scan it as such. Additionally, almost all stores have different receipts, so we have adapted the app to recognize most major stores, but we also allow a user to manually add the data in case a receipt is very different. Either way, a user will know when it's necessary to change or to add data with visual alerts when uploading receipts.

Another challenge was displaying the images of the items on the receipts. Not all receipts had item codes, stores that did have these codes ended up having different APIs. We overcame this challenge by finding an API called stocktrack.ca that combines the most popular store APIs in one place.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are all very proud to have turned this idea into a working prototype as we agreed to pursue this idea knowing the difficulty behind it. We have many great ideas to implement in the future and have agreed to continue this project beyond McHacks in hopes of one day completing it. We our grateful to have had the opportunity to work together with such talented, patient, and organized team members.

What we learned

With all the different skills each team member brought to the table, we were able to pick up new skills from each other. Some of us got introduced to new coding languages, others learned new UI design skills as well as simple organization and planning skills. Overall, McHacks has definitely showed us the value of team work, we all kept each other motivated and helped each other overcome each obstacle as a team.

What's next for Receipto?

Now that we have a working prototype ready, we plan to further test our application with a selected sample of users to improve the user experience. Our plan is to polish up the main functionality of the application, and to expand the idea by adding exciting new features that we just didn't have time to add. Although we may love the idea, we need to make sure to conduct more market research to see if it could be a viable service that could change the way people perceive receipts and potentially considering adapting Receipto.

Built With

• chakraui
• google-cloud-vision-api
• node.js
• playwright
• react
• recharts