Triggers from Outside

[Jack_Ruele]

Hi.

I have an app for my student Rental property, and it has become increasingly demanding for me to manage and track my payments. Every month I must go through dozens and dozens of pictures of proof of payments sent to me by my tenants Then I must see if the tenant did pay rent, and also take notice of those who didn’t pay rent. This task can be automated…

Is there a way my tenants can send their proof of payments to the app, and I can confirm if the payment was indeed done / or this could be automatic.

I am not sure of all capabilities of Appsheet,
Can these be achieved through the OCR technology, where tenants can upload a picture of the proof of payment, and then OCR converts the data to text which can be matched with data in columns, and if the data and date on the proof of payment corresponds with the then current month, the app can mark the tenant as having paid the rent for that month.

That’s just a way I think this could be done, I believe there might be others ways to achieve a similar output, I would appreciate your feedback.

I believe such a feature could also help thousands of small businesses with managing payments receipts and purchase receipts.

I would appreciate any suggestions.

Thank you.

[Rich (Rich Ellis)]

Yes it sure can! You would basically setup an app that allows your tenants to add a picture and then use OCR tech to pull the required info out of the image.

At a very basic level you would have a “Payment” table with 5 columns and another table with your expected rent payments per tenant called “Tenants” with “Tenant ID” and “Rent amount” columns:

Payment Table

• Text column called Tenant ID, this would be your unique reference to the tenant table
• Image column called “receipt”
• LongText column called “image text” that has an initial value “=OCRTEXT([Receipt])”
• Price column called “extracted amount” with an initial value of "max(EXTRACTPRICES([Image text])
• Yes/No column called “match” which would evaluate a match =if ( "lookup([Extracted Amount],“Tenants”, “Tenant ID”, “Rent”)=[Extracted Value],true, false)

Setting it up this way tells the app to ask a user for proof of payment picture, then the app pulls all of the text from the image and then will select the highest price value that it reads from the image. Once it has this price value it will then accomplish a lookup to match the expected rent amount and set the match value to yes or no.

With this core functionality, you can then build on top workflow rules and other features to make the app more usable.

A more complex way would also be to have the API from your payment providers send information into the Appsheet app too. However that requires some advanced knowledge of the APIs from the payment providers.

[Jack_Ruele]

Great. How do i match The Tenant ID between the two tables?

[Jack_Ruele]

The Expression above seems to have some inconsistencies, please it’s not working… Can you please check if everything is okay.

[Rich (Rich Ellis)]

In the payments table you will set the tenant ID as a ref column type. When you do that select the table with your tenants detail as the reference table.