"BillBox: A Local AI That Reads GST Bills, and a Checksum That Doesn't Trust It"
This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle What I Built Every month, small shops and freelancers in India end up with a pile of GST bills: phone photos, WhatsApp images, emailed PDFs. Before filing, somebody retypes them into Excel by hand. It's slow, an
Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle Submission 馃捀
This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle
Every month, small shops and freelancers in India end up with a pile of GST bills: phone photos, WhatsApp images, emailed PDFs. Before filing, somebody retypes them into Excel by hand. It's slow, and one misread digit can mean a wrong tax claim.
BillBox is a local-first bill reader. You drop in bill photos or PDFs, an open-weight vision model running on your own machine reads them, and plain code verifies every number before it reaches a spreadsheet. Anything doubtful gets flagged instead of silently accepted. The output is a colour-coded Excel file with a one-line summary and an expense category for each bill.
Who would pay: chartered accountants who handle dozens of small clients and lose hours every month to data entry, and small business owners who'd rather not pay for that typing. My pricing idea is a flat monthly fee for individuals and a per-batch fee for accountants. That's a hypothesis, not something I've validated.
The design rule fits in one sentence: the AI reads, the code decides. A vision model is good with messy photos and occasionally wrong about a digit, so I never let it decide whether a bill is correct.
The demo shows BillBox end to end: reading bills, the colour-coded review table where problem cells are highlighted, and the Excel export.
Read GST bills on your own computer with an open-weight AI model, verify every number with plain code, and export a clean Excel file for your CA.
BillBox turns a pile of photographed bills and PDF invoices into a reviewed, colour-coded spreadsheet. A local vision model reads each bill, deterministic rules check the result, and anything doubtful is flagged for a human instead of slipping into a tax filing. Nothing is uploaded to any cloud.
Built for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge (Week 2: Side Hustle).