keevora _

A small engineering war story. Indian invoices write dates in at least six common formats, and two of them are ambiguous with each other. 07/03/2025 is March 7 or July 3 depending on the billing software, and both interpretations are plausible for a purchase date.

Getting this wrong is not cosmetic. A swapped day and month can move a warranty expiry by four months, which means we either tell a user their coverage is over while it is active, or worse, promise coverage that already lapsed.

Our resolution stack, in order: explicit format cues elsewhere on the invoice, GST filing conventions of the retailer, delivery or payment timestamps when the receipt came from email, and finally a confidence flag that asks the user to confirm instead of guessing silently.

Receipt parsing sounded like a solved problem until I actually built it.

Thermal paper fades in 60-90 days. Retailers print GST invoices in at least a dozen layouts. Some put the warranty period in the footer, some in the line item, some nowhere at all. And the one field you need most, the purchase date, appears as 07/03/25, 7-Mar-2025, or 070325 depending on the billing software.

Our first parser got 61% field accuracy. Shipping that would have meant users correcting the AI more often than trusting it, which kills the product.

Every day, millions of products leave stores across India.

But once the purchase is complete, the customer is left managing:

• Receipts

• Warranty cards

• Claim emails

• Service center visits

• Expiry dates

This creates unnecessary support tickets, delayed claims, and frustrated customers.