Never lose a receipt again.
Papertrail organizes receipts, warranties and coupons, and reminds you before they expire. Has smart product recognition and vaults.
Built with Django, Postgres, Alpine.js, HTMX and Tailwind.
Just getting ready to deploy. All 800 tests passing. CI workflow passing. Next, gotta buy a vps, or server or smt, and launch.
Big change! Im allowing external recipeints (no accounts) to pay reimbursements, after verifying their emails
Added more recents to the dashboard. Added infinite scroll. and colaborative records.
Fully redesigned the search pages. I felt that the search pages were too monolithic so I introduced infinite scroll, with a new, Stripe inspired design.
Completely redesigned the record detail viewer AND added shareable records, for collaboration.
fully migrated to dramatiq with rabbit mq
I finallyyyyyyy got billing working, with storage plans! this took forever, and had soooo many hiccups, but its finally working, and is so satisfying!
I added my accent color over my dashbaord. Im also trying to get biling working, but its such a pain. Pretty close tho:
Added gated features. Also considering switching to dramatiq, for better performance and reliability, before production. Though, i might do that via ci/cd.
Yet again, new dashboard designs.
Improved reimbursment views templates - and fixed edge cases.
Finalized and styled the reimbursements system.
Created the peer to peer reimbusrements system that is evidence backed and MOVES REAL MONEY!
At this point, Ive also had the website penetration tested. The website at this stage also has IRS/IRD audit compliancy.
New dashboard designs.
Added IRS compliance - ie, 7 year mandatory retention period, plus entire change log. Its basically git for your expenses now.
Added merging support. Now, records pulled from plaid can be matched with a scanned record if one is availble, increasing security for the future reimbursement system.
Big update - I added plaid for automatic transaction intake - and made the App automatically create folders, and organize records into them.
Created folder system, that OCR can autocategorize in.
Allow users to choose to receive notifications.
Added push notifications to the app
Added email reminders for expiring records, that match my styling of the auth emails.
Added orphaned file cleanup cycle and pagination. Also cache more data so faster experience for the user.
Today, I did a lot of work in the background. Now - document processing occurs in a background process - users immediately are redirected to a skeleton loader, and then the add_record form when the data is ready. Furthermore, ocr results are cached for 15 mins so any page reloads, or tab closes prevent api rate limits being prematurely hit. The logs show this. the consistent get requests are the same add_record form being loaded with prepopulated data, after multiple reloads and tab reopens.
I optimized the dashboard and records list view. I realized cards were good for only a few records, but the moment they start piling up - it gets claustrophobic. So, i made the results appear as rows, like search results from google, or firefox.
I just did some small optimizations today. I realized that anybody could just “url-hop” to get to a password view and create a password - so I fully locked down all password views securely.
Over the past few days - i worked a bit more on micro interactions. I fixed a few bugs and added persistance for things like the sidebar and accordian state. I also added loading states for most other things as well (like the active search, auth pages…)
Today, I implemented HTMX in my records home view to create an active search, with the dateparser library for natural language date support. I also added it in the sidebar so no reloads are required for filtering records, changing pages…
Today, I created the system to upload multiple supporting files to a single record. So currently, the record creation process is a multi step process.
Upload file –> OCR –> record validation and creation –> supporting files addition
Further improved the user dashboard, and added some more links.
Made a nice looking user interface dashboard that shows recent documents and usefull stats, with quick links. as features are added, they will populate this.
I created a simple user dashboard. Its still far from complete, but better than the generic list view I was using before. Also added more document types for greater coverage.
Styled the form upload pages.
Today, I created a system where (in one step) - a document can be scanned, uploaded to cloudflare storage, and used to pre-populate a form.
the pipline so far looks like:
Scan doc –> OCR + llm –> prepopulate form –> user validation –> create record.
Or you can create a record manually.
The entire process is extremely secure. Documents are only interacted with via signed urls, all authentications are passwordless, and all uploads occur client side for fastest speed possible.
Today, I created the document storage system. Users can securely add, delete and read documents from cloudflare using temporary signed urls. The next step is to create a record system, that can be related to many documents.
Polished up user interface
Storing files now saves to google cloud storage.
I decided to ditch the colourfull theme for a monochromatic one.
Added dark and light mode support for all the other auth and account related pages (like email changing…). This was lots of fun (and quick) because much of the base work was completed because of django templating inheritance.
Today, I completed styling the auth pages. Now all match the light and dark theme of the landing page. This was wayy more time consuming than it ought to be, but, its finished now.
Styling the authentication forms. Django allauth makes this quite difficult, but its a work in progress.
Made dark mode for the landing page. I created a simple user interface design on figma (light and dark mode), to move away from notions image.
Today, I created a basic landing page for the project with tailwind and alpine js. It uses the notion interface as the hero image (since my interface isn’t even built yet!) but that will change soon…
I finally added Tailwind CSS and Alpine js to the project. For the longest time, Tailwind has always caused issues, but I finally got it working and it feels like magic - not having long css files. Here is a simple h1 element that changes from blue to red on hover.
Integrated Authentication (Local and OAuth).
Authentication is probably my favouite part of making a website - but also the most sensitive. Today, I integrated Django Allauth with Google and Github OAuth (and local sign in/up). The process was A LOT easier, quicker, and more secure than my previous “default” (default django auth), simply due its level of sophistication. I’m really excited about the progress today! Next step - styling.
Initialized Django project.
