🧾 PaperTrail

Smart Receipt Management. Automated. Organized. Insightful.

PaperTrail is a secure fintech platform that uses AI, OCR, and Gmail integration to automatically collect, parse, and organize receipts into a personal or business expense dashboard.
It streamlines expense tracking by combining automation, analytics, and intuitive design—all in one place.

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💡 Inspiration

Our team was inspired by a simple frustration: receipts are always getting lost.
Whether it’s a crumpled paper receipt or a digital one buried in an inbox, managing them manually is time-consuming and messy.

We wanted to solve that by creating a smart, automated system that could collect and organize receipts seamlessly—helping both individuals and small businesses keep track of their spending effortlessly.

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⚙️ How We Built It

🖥️ Frontend

• Next.js + Tailwind CSS (with dark mode support)

🧩 Backend

• Supabase for database and authentication
• Auth0 for secure login and user management

🧠 AI

• Gemini 2.5 Flash for OCR and structured text extraction

📧 Email Integration

• Gmail API for automatically fetching and parsing digital receipts

📊 Core Features

• Interactive Dashboard with visual analytics
• Upload Page (including live camera capture for receipts)
• All Receipts view and Folder Organization
• Automatic Gmail Receipt Syncing

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🧠 What We Learned

This project pushed us to explore new technologies and problem-solving strategies.
We learned how to:

• Integrate multiple APIs (Gmail, Gemini, Auth0, Supabase) cohesively
• Use Gemini 2.5 Flash for OCR and structured data extraction
• Handle authentication flows using Supabase and Auth0
• Visualize data effectively with pie, bar, line, and dot charts

Our AI pipeline can be summarized as: f_receipt = P(G(I))

Where:

• I: Image or PDF input
• G: Gemini model for extraction
• P: Parser that structures output into fields like merchant, date, and total

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🚧 Challenges

We faced several hurdles during development:

• Integrating the Gmail API with OAuth was tricky and time-consuming
• Fine-tuning the Gemini extraction model required extensive testing
• OCR accuracy varied across lighting conditions and receipt types
• Maintaining consistent styling (especially with dark mode) under time pressure

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🌍 Vision

We see PaperTrail helping individuals and small businesses simplify expense tracking.
In the future, we’d love to add:

• 🤖 AI-powered expense categorization
• 📤 Export options (e.g. CSV, QuickBooks)
• 💰 Budgeting insights based on spending patterns

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🏁 Takeaway

PaperTrail showed us how powerful AI can be when combined with thoughtful UX and solid engineering.
What started as a small annoyance—lost receipts—grew into a project that can help people stay financially organized with minimal effort.

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🧰 Tech Stack

Layer	Technologies
Frontend	Next.js, Tailwind CSS
Backend	Supabase, Auth0
AI	Gemini 2.5 Flash
Email Integration	Gmail API

This is a Next.js project bootstrapped with create-next-app.

Getting Started

First, clone the repository:

https://github.com/moibra05/papertrail.git

Then install dependencies:

npm i

Run the development server:

npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000 with your browser to see the result.