apocha: Expense tracker with receipt scanner and item categorization

Another expense tracker app. Why? Hi, I'm Olaf from Germany. In the past I tried a few expense trackers and Excel spreadsheet templates. With all apps or tools, the effort was far too high for me to enter the data as detailed as I want. They often look good and are superficially easy to use. In more detail, however, it gets more complicated when I e.g. want to enter a big weekend shopping. I don't just want to enter "Supermarket $100.80" or "Grocery $100.80". Because normally that's not just groceries. The expenses very likely fall into many individual categories such as groceries, household, drugstore, pet food, etc. In such a case a lot of manual work and split calculations with a calculator are necessary. And it is precisely this large amount of effort that has been the reason that I only managed to use an expense tracker for a few weeks, if at all. So I started building something on my own. I wanted an expense tracker app that automatically divides all individual items into the corresponding categories with as little effort as possible, e.g. apples into the fruit category, frozen pizza into prepared meals, and chocolate into sweets. The idea was born to automatically analyze a photo of the receipt using software. After a lot of trial and error, tinkering and programming, it worked quite well and was completely sufficient for me. Meanwhile I have over 5000 categories that are hierarchically divided. For example, for detergents, the full category is "Home & Garden > Household Supplies > Laundry Supplies > Laundry Detergent". This makes it possible to get a rough overview of the main categories as well as to see in detail what the money is being spent on. And this simply by taking a picture of the receipt. After some conversations and discussions with people who also track or want to track their expenses, new requirements and ideas came up that I personally do not need for my expense tracker. E.g. many also want to use it to manage their income, differentiate between fixed and variable costs and between necessary and unnecessary expenses, create budgets and savings plans, and much more. This led me to further develop my little app. Now apocha's goal is to become the simplest, smartest and most useful expense tracker and financial management tool ever. Of course, there's some work in the beginning, especially if you are among the first users in the US. apocha's recognition and categorization model works very well for receipts from Germany and Austria, but today is quite untrained for receipts from US merchants (I simply haven't had enough receipts to train the recognition model.). But this will vastly improve during the next weeks. Currently apocha uses a generic receipt recognition model and is not able to automatically categorize all the line items. If you want to try it, you could take a picture of a receipt, edit the item categories, and then take a picture of another (or the same) receipt. As soon as apocha has learned an expense category for a specific item, you will not have to edit the category again. Of course, editing the item categories will also help other users. And other users will help you. apocha's UI is available in German and English. The receipt recognition works for receipts from merchants in the US, Germany and Austria. Receipts from UK are partly supported. Plans for 2021 include budgeting, support for stocks and crypto currencies, product warnings, intelligently pre-filled shopping lists, nutrition and environmental product information, competitions, and much more. A more generic machine learning model is in the making to support receipts from other countries out of the box. So, try it, use the free Standard plan or, even better, subscribe to a Plus or Premium plan to support further development of my app. :-) In any case, please let me know what you think. Thanks in advance and a happy new year 2021. Olaf

Aaron Levi Yahalom

Great project. Will try today in Latvia. If it's not working, I'm ready to help you localize and locally monetize. Cheers!

4yr ago

Olaf Kortüke

apocha

Maker

@aaron_levi_yahalom Hi Aaron, thank you very much. Currently only German and English are available as UI languages. You can try with receipts from Latvia, but I do not know whether that will show some usable results. Please let me know.

@aaron_levi_yahalom man, it's unfortunately not working in Latvia! It feels like you need to apply 80/20 principle to cash registers.

@aaron_levi_yahalom @apocha Give me your email. Or just check latest from aaron@apocha.app . We have latin alphabet. Developed by German scientists btw.

I'm sorry. Could you please send me some receipt images to support@apocha.app so that I can train the software accordingly?

@apocha definitely! Thank you so much! Check it! Just sent!

Simon Auer

Sounds awesome! Definitely going to try it out :) Congracts!

@simonauer Thank you. I really appreciate it.

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Expense tracker with receipt scanner and item categorization

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