Inspiration

Several people do not keep track of their expenses. In US alone, 45.5% of individuals have not saved anything for their retirement. People make online payments as well payments using cash. Traditional banking application cannot keep track of cash transactions or transactions from some other bank account. This motivated us to create an easy-to-use telegram bot to track cash flows for an individual.

What it does

Bot-dget is an all in one expense tracking telegram bot which keeps track of individual expenses, taxes and other financial transaction. Our bot employs OCR to recognize and parse receipts from images. You can also send a voice message or text messages to record/retrieve transaction data.

Why Telegram bot?

We figured if a person uses a mobile app to keep track of their expenses then it is very easy forget about using the application everytime they pay. However, telegram is widely used and the bot can be pinned in the conversations. This would remind the user to track their expenses everytime they open Telegram

How we built it

Tech stack:

Express.js MongoDB Python Telegram bot API PyTesseract

Challenges we ran into

It was extremely difficult to integrate the backend and also make calls to the telegram bot API. After that we ran into problems while parsing receipts using OCR and retrieve bill data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud we buit an end-to-end telegram bot with most of the functionality we desired.

What we learned

We learnt about building telegram bots and OCR as this was our first time using such a tech stack.

What's next for Bot-dget

We plan to extend the functionality so that its easier for people with disabilities to record and track their expenses.

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