Receipt Sorter: a freelancer's tax-season tool that never leaves the laptop

Description and use

Receipt Sorter automatically sorts and structures electronic receipts and invoices locally, producing a CSV and categorized folders while keeping all data offline.

Problem

Freelancers and small studios spend hours sorting receipts and invoices each tax season, often handling sensitive client documents that should not be uploaded to cloud services.

Outcome

The tool reduces manual receipt sorting to a single offline script run, producing a clean CSV and organized folder structure while keeping all data on the local machine.

Workflow

• Scan or copy receipts into a source folder
• Run the Receipt Sorter script locally (no internet required)
• The script reads PDFs with pypdf and sends text to the Qwen2.5 3B model via Ollama
• Model returns structured JSON; Pydantic validates it
• If validation succeeds, file is copied to category folder with renamed filename and metadata added to CSV
• If validation fails twice, file name is added to needs_review.txt
• Script outputs summary of sorted files and review list

Evidence

Receipt Sorter turns a messy folder of receipts and invoices into a clean CSV and a tidy, renamed folder structure.

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For each document it extracts the vendor, date, total, currency and a category (software, travel, meals, office, equipment, utilities, other).

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Anything it can't read confidently goes into a needs_review.txt list instead of being silently guessed.

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The demo runs with Wi‑Fi turned off.

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Model: Qwen2.5 3B, an open-weight model, running locally through Ollama.

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