PDF Bill Templates
Work in progress
This page is a stub. A full walkthrough with screenshots is coming.
Provider bills are PDFs, and typing their figures by hand is tedious. HomeLog's template wizard lets you teach the app to read a given provider's layout once — after that, uploading a bill auto-fills the amount, period, meter reading, and more.
How it works
- Upload a sample bill. HomeLog converts the PDF to text and detects tokens like amounts, dates, meter codes (POD/PDR), and numbers.
- Tag the fields. In a 3-step wizard, point at the value you want for each field (total amount, period, provider reading…). HomeLog records where it sits on the page and how to recognise it.
- Save the template. Assign it as the default for a service, and future bills from the same provider are parsed automatically.
Extraction strategy
To stay accurate even when a label appears more than once on a page, HomeLog tries several strategies in order: unique global IDs first, then anchor/label position, then the spot you originally tagged, then a pattern match with surrounding context.
TIP
Extraction patterns are restricted to a regex flavour without look-ahead / look-behind, which keeps parsing fast and predictable on low-powered hardware.