receipt_long Invoicing
document_scanner OCR
front_hand Stops at the CAPTCHA
A toll invoicing bot: automating only as far as it is right to
Invoicing dozens of toll receipts by hand is mechanical work and perfectly automatable. The interesting part of this project is where I decided the automation should stop.
Tech stack
TesseractGemini VisionPlaywright
flag
Context
Anyone driving long distances accumulates toll receipts that must be invoiced one by one across different portals. The bot reads the receipts with optical recognition — combining a classic engine with a vision model — and completes the process by driving the portal automatically.
rule
The decision that defines the project
- • It does not try to solve CAPTCHAs or bypass any of the portal's protections.
- • When the site asks for human intervention, the batch is marked «needs review» instead of forcing its way through.
- • The result is a process that saves the mechanical work without putting the user on the wrong side of a third party's terms of use.
lightbulb
What I learned
That in automation, knowing where to stop is as much an engineering decision as an ethical one. A bot that forces protections works until it stops working, and by then the problem is no longer technical.