receipt-renamer

Point it at the folder your scanner app drops files into. For every receipt image/PDF it OCRs the page and renames it to something searchable:

Receipt 2024-03-14 1042 Safeway SNAP EBT Adobe Scan.jpg

Non-receipt scans (lecture notes, handouts) are handled by a separate rule layer: it reads the page-top title and expands course codes into every form you might later search for, so CHE2A Midterm Review.pdf becomes:

CHE2A Midterm Review CHE 2A Chem 2A Genius Scan.pdf

and OChem Lecture Notes.pdf becomes:

OChem Lecture Notes Organic Chemistry CHE8A CHE 8A Chem 8A.pdf

Everything — the store list, the SNAP/EBT patterns, the receipt heuristics, the scanner-app markers, the course rules, and the filename templates — lives in one YAML file you can edit.

How the name is built

Receipts use the template:

Receipt {datetime} {store} {SNAP EBT if present} {scanner-app} {your notes}

• {datetime} — parsed from the receipt (YYYY-MM-DD HHMM); many date/time formats are understood (US MM/DD/YYYY, ISO YYYY-MM-DD, Jan 5, 2024, 12h/24h times). If no date is found it falls back to Receipt {store} ….
• {store} — matched against a known-store list (Safeway, Costco, Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, Target, Walmart, Kroger, CVS, Walgreens, Aldi, Sprouts, and more — all editable).
• SNAP EBT — inserted only when a SNAP/EBT line is detected.
• {scanner-app} — detected from the OCR text or the original filename (Genius Scan, Adobe Scan, CamScanner, Microsoft Lens, …).
• {your notes} — anything you pass with --notes.

Empty fields collapse cleanly — no double spaces, no dangling separators.

Documents (anything not detected as a receipt) use:

{title} {course-code aliases} {scanner-app} {your notes}

Install

Requires the Tesseract OCR engine on your PATH, plus poppler if you want to OCR PDFs.

# macOS
brew install tesseract poppler
# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr poppler-utils

pip install -e .

Usage

# Dry run over a folder (prints planned renames, changes nothing):
receipt-renamer batch ~/Scans

# Apply the renames:
receipt-renamer batch ~/Scans --commit

# Move renamed files into a tidy archive instead of renaming in place:
receipt-renamer batch ~/Scans --commit --dest ~/Receipts

# One file, with a note:
receipt-renamer one ~/Scans/IMG_0001.jpg --commit --notes "reimburse work"

# Watch the folder and rename new scans as they arrive:
receipt-renamer watch ~/Scans --commit

# Print the default config so you can copy and tweak it:
receipt-renamer dump-config > my-rules.yaml
receipt-renamer batch ~/Scans --config my-rules.yaml --commit

Dry run is the default. Nothing is renamed until you pass --commit.

Configuration

Run receipt-renamer dump-config to see the full annotated default. Highlights:

• stores — canonical name + aliases/spellings. Whole-word matching, so Target won't match "targeting". Longest matching alias wins.
• snap_patterns — regexes that flag a SNAP/EBT receipt.
• receipt_signals / receipt_min_signals — a page is a receipt if a known store is found, or if it hits at least this many signals (TOTAL, TAX, $x.xx, card brands, …). This catches receipts from stores not in your list.
• courses — both a generic DEPT + number pattern (with a subject_map so CHE → Chem) and explicit rules (OChem → Organic Chemistry + the CHE8A/CHE 8A/Chem 8A family).
• templates / datetime_format — the output filename shapes.

Architecture

The core operates entirely on text, never on pixels, so it's fast to test and the OCR backend is swappable:

Tests

pip install -e ".[test]"
pytest

The bulk of the suite runs against saved OCR-text fixtures (in tests/fixtures/) and a mocked OCR function, so it needs no Tesseract. tests/test_ocr_end_to_end.py renders a synthetic receipt with Pillow and runs the real Tesseract pipeline; it skips automatically if the binary is absent.

Notes & limitations

• OCR quality is bounded by Tesseract and the scan. Faded thermal receipts and skewed photos will parse worse; the heuristics are deliberately forgiving.
• Date parsing favours the first plausible date on the page. Very unusual layouts may pick the wrong one — review a dry run before --commit.
• For PDFs, only the first couple of pages are OCR'd (configurable via --pdf-pages).

License

MIT — see LICENSE.