I'm wondering if I'm the only one doing this. Here's my workflow:
- Just after going to the doctor, dentist or picking up medicine, I scan the receipt to my Google Drive, then trash the paper. My wife, who is my dependent, also gives me her receipts.
- Every couple of weeks, I go through the scanned receipts and add entries into the Excel template provided by the NTA (see screenshot below). I save all processed scans to a yearly archive in case I'm ever asked for justifications.
- During 確定申告, if we ended up with more than 100,000¥ expenses in the year, I upload the excel file in the online tax return app to claim my deduction.
Now I know there is supposed to be a way to automate this somehow through the MyNumber card but I never managed to get it to work properly:
- Data is sometimes missing as my employer's insurance company has not yet collated everything and synced with the government systems. This might have improved in the past few years and with old school insurance cards being phased out and replaced by MyNumber for every doctor's visit, maybe not a problem anymore.
- At the beginning of the tax return process, you can link your dependents data through by authenticating with their MyNumber card, but every time I tried it has failed to sync their medical expenses, maybe due to the same issue as in the previous bullet point.
- Some expenses are not covered by insurance but do qualify for deductions and I'm not sure they would appear in the MyNumber data even if I managed to get the auto export. Last year I got a dental implant for example, or childbirth expenses.
So this is why I've continued to do my little scan/input/upload process. Am I the only one?
The reason I'm asking is because I've grown tired of the manual data entry and file management, so I built some automation for myself recently. It's a Telegram bot to whom you send pictures of the receipts, it scans them with the OpenAI API, recognizes the probable classification (Treatment, Prescription or Other) and save it all in its database. At the end of the year you send an /extract command and it generates the excel file for your tax return as well as a zip file of all the receipts photos.
If there is some interest for it, I could productize it and make it available to everyone with an inexpensive yearly subscription (AI processing is not free).
If anyone wants to beta test it, hit me up.
Screenshot of the bot in action:
by furansowa