src/_posts/parking-expenses-automation/2025-03-02-parking-expenses-automation.md

@@ -1,102 +0,0 @@
----
-layout: post
-title: Automating a Parking Expenses Report
-date: 2025-03-02 14:38:00 Europe/Amsterdam
-categories: paperless paperless-ngx nix python python3
----
-
-For the past year, I was consulting at a place where I could request
-reimbursement of parking expenses. This had to be claimed using a standard Excel
-template.
-
-Doing this manually every month seemed boring, so I automated a significant part
-of that:
-
-- Fetch parking costs for a certain month from my Paperless-ngx instance
-- Calculate costs after taxes and a grand total
-- Fill in an Excel sheet with the details
-- Convert the Excel sheet to PDF and append photos of parking costs
-
-Note: I don't expect anybody to have the same requirements as me here, but
-hopefully pieces can be useful to some. The open-sourced project can be found
-[here](https://git.kun.is/pim/parking-expenses).
-
-# Organizing the Parking Costs
-
-Each time I would park, I would accumulate a parking ticket. This ticket
-contains the following information:
-
-- Date and time
-- Car license plate
-- Price
-- VAT
-
-In order to automate the report, I had to have this information in a structured
-way. Therefore, I turned to [Paperless-ngx](https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/).
-Paperless-ngx is an self-hostable open-source service that helps digitalizing
-paper documents. Third-party mobile apps help quickly scanning documents and
-uploading them to the server. This is exactly what I did with the parking
-tickets as well: each time I received a ticket, I would scan it with the
-Paperless app.
-
-Paperless-ngx uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to cleverly extract the
-date of the ticket automatically. I also created a custom label to indicate a
-parking ticket, and I added custom fields to indicate a ticket's cost and VAT
-amount. You can see this information in the screenshot below.
-
-![foo](ticket.png) _Translated from Dutch: aanmaakdatum means creation date,
-parkeerkaart means parking ticket, BTW means VAT and bedrag means cost_
-
-Paperless-ngx will also automatically learn to label the tickets with the
-"parking ticket" label, based on the document's content. That just leaves the
-VAT and price data points. Unfortunately I found the OCR to be too unreliable to
-extract that text from the documents. Therefore, I had to manually set those two
-data points for each ticket.
-
-Neat, we now have all parking tickets organized on Paperless-ngx! In order to
-create a report, we can just query the Paperless-ngx API!
-
-# Using the Paperless-ngx API
-
-The remaining part of this post will be code explanations. You can find the full
-open-sourced Python code
-[here](https://git.kun.is/pim/parking-expenses/src/commit/645fd8b4e4e46bc8f3d8ba831ca28261cd3edb39/main.py).
-
-Paperless-ngx has [an API](https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/api/) we can now use
-to query our parking tickets. I found the filtering logic pretty hard to
-understand. Therefore I simply looked at what API calls the web UI makes with
-the query I needed. This turned out to be something like this:
-
-```python
-response = requests.get(
-    f"{paperless_ngx_url}/api/documents/?page_size=50&query=created:[{start_date} TO {end_date}]&tags__id__all={FILTER_TAG_ID}&correspondent__id__in={FILTER_CORRESPONDENT_ID}",
-    headers={"Authorization": f"Token {token}"},
-)
-```
-
-In the above code snippet, `FILTER_TAG_ID` is the ID of the "Parking ticket"
-label and `FILTER_CORRESPONDENT_ID` is the ID of the correspondent (I included
-this to filter out potential unrelated parking tickets).
-
-Perfect, this returns a JSON list of parking tickets we can use to create the
-report!
-
-# Creating the Report
-
-All that's left is to fill in an Excel template now. This actually proved to be
-the most annoying part but also the most boring part. I used the
-[OpenPyXL](https://openpyxl.readthedocs.io/en/stable/) Python library to
-manipulate the Excel sheets and basically just add a row for each parking
-ticket. For code, check
-[here](https://git.kun.is/pim/parking-expenses/src/commit/645fd8b4e4e46bc8f3d8ba831ca28261cd3edb39/main.py#L104).
-
-To convert the Excel sheet to a PDF, I used the (apparently now deprecated)
-[unoconv](https://github.com/unoconv/unoconv) utility. It uses LibreOffice under
-the hood for the conversion, which adds a 2GiB dependency for the project 🫠.
-
-Finally, to merge the report PDF with photos of the parking tickets, I used the
-[PyPDF2](https://pypdf2.readthedocs.io/en/3.x/) Python library.
-
-I would now show some example output, but it contains quite some sensitive
-information so unfortunately I can't... But I never had any complaints from the
-finance department, so it worked great!

src/now.md

@@ -6,9 +6,7 @@ excerpt: Things I am working on now
 comments: false
 ---
 
-_Last updated: 2025-03-02_
+*Last updated: 2024-05-11*
 
-- I'm **hacking** on my [k3s](https://k3s.io/) cluster using
+- I'm **hacking** on my [k3s](https://k3s.io/) cluster using [❄️ NixOS ❄️](https://nixos.org/) and [Kubenix](https://kubenix.org/)
-  [❄️ NixOS ❄️](https://nixos.org/) and [Kubenix](https://kubenix.org/)
+- I'm **playing** [🧩 The Talos Principle 2 🤖](https://store.steampowered.com/app/835960/The_Talos_Principle_2/)
-- I'm **playing**
-  [🧩 The Binding of Isaac: Repentance 🔪](https://www.nicalis.com/games/thebindingofisaacrepentance)