A small tool for processing invoice and receipt data

TallyScan didn't start in a boardroom or with a pitch deck. It started on a Sunday afternoon, surrounded by paper invoices, receipts, and three different open email tabs, trying to figure out where the last month's revenue had actually gone.

Like many of you, we run small businesses. And like many of you, we found that the "administrative" part of running a business was slowly eating away at the time we wanted to spend actually building things.

We spent hours every month downloading PDF invoices, manually typing dates into spreadsheets, and triple-checking totals on every receipt. It was boring, error-prone, and frankly, a waste of life.

Why another tool?

When we looked for a invoice processing solution, we found two types of software. The first was built for "Enterprises"—it was expensive, bloated with lots of accounting-specific features we'd never use, and felt like it required a training course just to set up. We just wanted a simple tool to extract the data from invoices or receipts into a spreadsheet.

The second type was more affordable, but it often came with a hidden cost: a lack of transparency. Many tools required broad, all-or-nothing access to email inboxes, leaving users with little control over what was being scanned. To us, that felt like a step too far for a simple invoice extraction task.

We realized there was no middle ground. There was no tool that was simple, affordable, and gave users total control over their privacy.

So, we thought, why not build it ourselves?

The timing felt right. The recent breakthroughs in AI meant that what used to require a massive engineering team could now be handled by sophisticated, lightweight models. We realized that AI had finally reached a point where it could "read" and understand the messy, varied layouts of invoices and receipts with human-level accuracy—but at a thousand times the speed.

So we started building TallyScan.

Initially, it was just a private tool to solve our own headaches. But when a friend—an e-commerce seller who was also buried under a mountain of supplier invoices—saw what we were doing, he immediately asked if he could use it too.

That was the turning point. We decided to turn our little project into a proper SaaS service. Truth be told, we didn't know if anyone else would find it useful or if the world really needed another tool. We just felt it was worth doing, and so we did it.