Automating Reciept Sorting For The "Slow And Steady"Challenge

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady

What I Built

Sloths have the right idea: why do manual work when you can automate it? For this week's theme, I upgraded my local receipt extractor into a Bulk Receipt Sorter.

Instead of uploading invoices one by one, freelancers and small business owners can now upload 10+ receipts at once. My app extracts the Vendor Name, Date, and Amount from all of them and compiles them into a single CSV file (which opens in Excel) ready for their accountant. This truly "rewards laziness" by saving hours of manual data entry.

Demo

Code

Since this is a local Python app running via Streamlit, here is the core logic that handles the bulk processing and CSV generation:

python

Core loop for bulk processing

for i, uploaded_file in enumerate(uploaded_files):
image = Image.open(uploaded_file)
extracted_text = pytesseract.image_to_string(image)

prompt = f"Extract Vendor, Date, Total Amount from: {extracted_text}"

response = ollama.chat(model='llama3', messages=[{'role': 'user', 'content': prompt}])

  
  
  Append to dataframe...

How I Built It

· UI: Streamlit (Python)
· OCR: Tesseract OCR (to read text from images)
· AI Engine: Ollama running Llama 3 locally. No cloud APIs were used.
· Data handling: Pandas (for creating the downloadable CSV).

The app loops through all uploaded images, extracts the raw text, asks the local Llama 3 model to structure it, and builds a downloadable table.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

Because this process involves hundreds of receipts over a month, using a paid cloud API (like OpenAI) would cost a lot of money and take a long time due to network requests.
By using Ollama to run Llama 3 locally:

1. It's 100% Free: I can process 500 receipts and it won't cost a single rupee in API fees. No token limits.
2. Privacy: Freelancers don't want to send 50 images of their client bills to a cloud server. This runs completely offline on the laptop.
3. Speed: No internet lag. The AI processes the images directly on the local CPU.

The Lazy Payoff

This app saves a freelancer hours of tedious data entry. Instead of opening 50 PDFs and typing numbers into Excel, they can dump all 50 images into this app, click one button, and download a ready-to-use Excel sheet.

Prize Categories

I am entering the Open Source AI category.