A logbook you photograph into

The problem

Receipts arrive as paper and stay as paper. Documents arrive as photographs on a phone and stay as photographs. Everything in both piles is information that somebody would have to type up before it became useful, and nobody does.

The friction

The entering is the whole problem. A receipt is thirty seconds of typing, which is why it never happens — and by the time there are two hundred of them, the backlog is the reason not to start.

Documents are worse. A photograph of a page is not searchable, not readable at a glance, and not something you can do anything with except look at it.

The system

Nondvahi — नोंदवही, Marathi for a register or logbook — takes a photograph from the phone's browser, with nothing to install.

Receipts are extracted and sorted into spending categories, with day, week and month views of where money actually went. Other documents become clean, readable documents with their structure kept rather than flattened into an image. Documents in Marathi can be read in English translation.

Anything the system produces can be downloaded and printed.

The workflow

The system reads the receipt and proposes a category. A review screen shows what it read and what it proposed, and the person confirms or corrects it before it is recorded.

That review step is not a stage we expect to remove later. Extraction from a crumpled receipt photographed in bad light will sometimes be wrong, and the cheapest place to catch that is immediately, with the receipt still in hand.

What we learned

Extraction with a review screen is a different product from extraction alone. The system is allowed to be uncertain, because a person is going to look anyway, and that makes it useful much earlier than it would be if every reading had to be right.

Nondvahi is in active build, scoped as a minimum viable product and built for multiple users from the first day. Its first customer is the person who wrote it.