SlipTrack — Enhanced

A neutral, clean web app to upload receipts/invoices, OCR parse them, and keep a searchable expense journal with VAT (South Africa, 15%). This version includes asynchronous processing for scalability and support for PDF documents.

Quickstart

1. System Dependencies

Before installing Python packages, you need to install a few system-level dependencies.

Tesseract (for OCR):

• Windows: Download from Tesseract at UB Mannheim. Add the install directory (e.g., C:\Program Files\Tesseract-OCR) to your system's PATH.
• macOS (Homebrew): brew install tesseract
• Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr
• Verify: tesseract --version

Poppler (for PDF processing):

• Windows: Download the latest binaries from the Poppler for Windows project. Add the bin/ directory to your system's PATH.
• macOS (Homebrew): brew install poppler
• Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install poppler-utils
• Verify: pdftotext -v

Redis (for background task queue):

• macOS (Homebrew): brew install redis and then brew services start redis
• Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install redis-server
• Docker (Recommended for ease of use): docker run -d -p 6379:6379 redis
• Verify: redis-cli ping (should return PONG)

2. Python Setup

# Create and activate a virtual environment
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate  # Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate

# Install Python packages
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Set the Flask app environment variable
export FLASK_APP=sliptrack.app:create_app
# On Windows, use: set FLASK_APP=sliptrack.app:create_app

# Initialize the database
flask db init  # Only if you've never run it before
flask db migrate -m "Initial migration"
flask db upgrade

3. Running the Application

You need to run two processes in separate terminals: the Flask web server and the Celery background worker.

Terminal 1: Run the Celery Worker

celery -A sliptrack.celery_worker.celery_app worker --loglevel=info

Terminal 2: Run the Flask App

flask run

The application will be available at http://127.0.0.1:5000.

Notes

• Uploads are saved to sliptrack/static/uploads, with thumbnails in sliptrack/static/thumbs.
• OCR and PDF processing are handled asynchronously by a Celery worker.
• Tailwind CSS is included via a CDN for simple styling.
• The app includes basic authentication, CSRF protection, and upload rate limiting.