Shoebox: a freelancer's receipt sorter that never leaves the laptop
This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle What I Built Shoebox is a command-line tool that turns a messy folder of receipts and invoices into a sorted archive, a CSV ledger, and a tax-time summary. Everything runs on the freelancer's own machine. Every freelancer I can think of has the same quarterly ritual: dig through Downloads , email attachments…
Shoebox is an open-source command-line tool designed to help freelancers and solo consultants manage their receipts and invoices. The tool sorts a messy folder of documents into a structured archive, CSV ledger, and tax-time summary, all without leaving the freelancer's laptop. Shoebox works by hashing each file to ensure that re-running the tool only processes new documents, sending the text or photo of each receipt to a local open-weight model for extraction of relevant information like vendor, date, total, tax, currency, category, and document type.
The tool then validates the model's output, copies the file into its sorted location, and writes the results to ledger.csv and summary.md files. Shoebox runs entirely on the freelancer's own machine and doesn't require any third-party APIs, making it an attractive option for those looking to avoid extra costs. The tool uses an open-weight model like Gemma 3 via Ollama and doesn't rely on any external cloud services.
The code is written in plain Python and has minimal dependencies. While Shoebox is still a prototype, it aims to simplify the often tedious task of managing financial documents for freelancers.
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