Ledgerly: A Smart Invoice Organizer for Freelancers

Prakhar Saraswat — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 05:34:18 +0000

This is my submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge — Week 2: Side Hustle.

What I Built

Ledgerly is a Smart Invoice Organizer designed to help freelancers and small business owners manage invoices, receipts, and expenses more easily.

Manually organizing receipts and extracting expense details can be time-consuming. Ledgerly aims to simplify this process by allowing users to upload documents, extract information, organize expenses, and review their spending through a dashboard.

Features

Invoice and receipt processing: Upload documents for text extraction.
OCR integration: Use Tesseract.js to extract text from supported documents.
AI-assisted extraction: Optional integration with a locally runnable Ollama model (Qwen), depending on configuration.
Expense dashboard: Review and organize extracted expense information.
CSV export: Export expense records for further analysis.

Tech Stack

Frontend: React, Vite, CSS
Backend: Node.js, Express.js
OCR: Tesseract.js
Open-weight AI: Ollama with Qwen (optional)
Database: MongoDB, with an in-memory fallback

Why Open Innovation Matters

Invoices and receipts can contain sensitive financial information. Using a locally runnable open-weight model can help reduce reliance on external AI APIs and may improve privacy by keeping processing local when the application is configured accordingly.

Open-source tools also give developers more flexibility to inspect, customize, and adapt their software instead of depending entirely on a closed service's pricing and limitations.

My goal with Ledgerly is to explore how open-source AI can make everyday financial organization more accessible to freelancers and small businesses.

Who Could Benefit?

Freelancers, independent developers, and small business owners who want a simpler way to organize their receipts and expenses.

Links

GitHub repository: https://github.com/prakharsaraswat07/smart-invoice-organizer

Screenshots: Add screenshots of the working application.

Future Improvements

Improve extraction accuracy for scanned invoices and complex PDFs.
Add more reliable expense categorization.
Improve validation and handling of missing or incorrect invoice details.
Make the setup process easier for new users.

This project is part of my exploration of practical applications of open-source AI through the Hacktoberfest 2026 Week 2: Side Hustle challenge.

devchallenge #hf26challenge4

DEV Community: Prakhar Saraswat