I research technologies to speed up the receipt data collection. There is a product called "NeatReceipts" that purports to scan the receipts and pull the data off of them automatically. It's out of my budget right now so I'm opting for a home-grown approach at the moment.
I've created a mySQL database for holding a bunch of information from each receipt. Ideally I'd like to capture information about the actual items purchased but for the time being, I'm collecting:
- receipt info
- ID - a unique receipt identifier for the database (primary key)
- date
- time
- total
- vendor info
- name
- store no
- address (street, city, state, zip)
- phone
- salesperson name or number
- Google Maps URL
- receipt image
- scanned? (scanned receipt)
- quickened? (in Quicken)
At the moment, I'm gathering the Google Maps URL info by manually mapping vendor locations in a map I've created. Once I find the location, I copy the link to the location and enter it into the database. By manually collecting these, I may be able to parse out lat/log or GPS data to use by some other means (once I find out the meaning of the geocode info in the URL) or I could use the URL for some other proof-of-concept "behavior" while I figure out the API.I also want to find out the best way to manage the images so they can be referenced by any program I've created. At the moment, I'm adopting the convention used frequently by document management systems -- the receipt image field holds the full pathname where the image file can be found rather than the actual image file itself.
I have about 30 receipts recorded in the database right now. I plan on creating a better data entry mechanism than I'm currently using to speed up data entry.
