(no subject)

[contrarianarchon]

Request for a utility: I've been wanting to make more detailed breakdowns of my food expenses than I have currently, but transcribing my receipts manually sounds like a massive pain and I do not wish to do it. Any suggestions for someone wishing to increase the detail of my spreadsheets in this manner and not willing to transcribe them by hand?

(I am spending *way* too much money on food. Like, norway is *expensive* but this is still absurd. And I don't have a good sense for where exactly that money is going when referencing what recipes I'm cooking. So I need to start recording what everything costs and looking at it *properly*. Which is a massive pain)

Comments

[brin_bellway]

I haven't used receipt-transcription software myself, but I know it exists.

A bit of digging suggests that we're still in an early enough stage with this that the fancy stuff is all for-profit. I think if I were you, I'd try this basic but FOSS one first, and if it wasn't enough I'd try Zoho next (apparently it's aimed at businesses and therefore has a relatively large cap on the free version: 100 receipts/month is a mere trial period for the *intended* audience), followed by googling up other OCR software if necessary.

[contrarianarchon]

Ooh thank you! It's so nice to know that things that ought to exist actually exist, also that other people are better at google research than I am (when I looked, I mostly found companies trying to sell me custom-tailored OCR solutions, presumably targeting businesses that are commingling a much larger bugjet to this than I am, and just barely indicating that a solution *could* exist. That and things that assumes you owned a scanning machine). I'll try these out when I next feel like messing with my phone's software.