So, I have something in mind that would save me an incredible amount of time if only I could automate it. But I cant figure out where the limitations are and what is even possible. So here is the scenario I wanted to automate:

I get lots of invoices in paper form that I have to scan and upload to two instances that refund the money to my bank account before I can pay them.

  1. What I was now thinking was to scan the papers with Paperless-ngx, upload them to my google drive account and then send it manually to the two instances in the same time.
  2. Afterwards I thought of something that maybe reads the uploaded documents via ocr and automatically inputs data like “amount, date, name” and so on to an excel or google spreadsheet. I do not know any cheap / free way to do that though.
  3. With Excel VBA Scripts I would try to move the collected data to specific spreadsheets that show me what state the transaction is in.

Now it gets tricky where I have no more clue what is even possible. In a perfect world,

  • My Amazon Alexa could interact with the spreadsheet and set a reminder for two weeks after I received the invoice that I have to pay it. This would be very important since I often forget to pay them.
  • Alexa reads the notifications of my Samsung Smartphone and notifies me when my Bank tells me that the invoice amount is refunded and is on my bank account. Ideally it would enter the amount of the refund into the spreadsheet but I do not think that this would be possible.
  • After the full amount of the refund entered my Bank account, Alexa would let me know that I can pay the bill. Maybe there is a trigger with Excel VBA I could use, for example to let Alexa notify me when a column of a spreadsheet changes color to green.

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Do you guys out there think that something like this project would be possibe? Any tips on what tools I could use?

  • minimaldolphin@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    a professor was giving a lecture on onomatopoeia. he said, “ in some languages, a double negative forms a positive. however, in no other languages, such as russian, a single negative form a negative. ” he pointed out that there is no language, but in many languages, where a double positive can form a positive

  • gbdavidx@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    This really isnt a home-automation item, perhaps try looking into power automate

  • FattyTunaSalad@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I work in software doing accounts payable automation. Without coding your going to have to rely on a huge stack to get this done. With coding you could maybe get away with a couple programs? You would want something like flexicapture and an FTP like WinSCP. Upload files to WinSCP. File gets pulled into flexicapture. Flexi uses OCR and fills fields. Once complete flexi sends a data file back to WinSCP with field details for that invoice.

    The problem I see aside from getting your stack flow correct which will be difficult. is that OCR is very finicky dealing with invoices. For instance it will see PO #’s everywhere and you need to manually adjust that.

  • daPh1l1@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I do not know any cheap / free way to do that though.

    Some time ago we developed an app where we needed a function to take a photo of a receipt and extract the data like total price, product items, shop name, address, etc. Back then we started, like you, to search for some products on the market to fulfill this task. Unfortunately all the solutions we found were quite expensive or not working as we expected.

    We then decided to develop it on our own. Recently we have added the possibility to process invoices too. You can find the new endpoint of our REST API in the documentation: https://www.eagle-doc.com/documentation.php

    If you stay below 100 receipt or invoice pages per month, the service is free. After that you only pay 0.03 € per page with a pay as you go pricing model.