The problem BillEase solves

Whenever we pay bills at shop, we get a bill's paper receipt which although is short in length but eventually when put together globally results in piles of paper resulting in loss. Also, we usually tend to throw away the bill receipts as it is difficult to file them.
At times, it becomes difficult for shop owner to keep a track of his current available stock manually.There are chances of the bills being tampered by third party as well.

BillEase is a system wherein hardcopy of bills, i.e, paper bills are not generated at any point of time thereby making it environment friendly to save trees.
Shop owner can use an inventory management portal for them wherein they can keep track of their product stock easily. It has two access levels - shop owner and customer.

Web Application :

1. Used by shop owners to access inventory management.
2. Supports addition of product, details, price, quantity to database
3. Barcode is generated and assigned to each newly added product
4. Updation and deletion of products from inventory
5. Overall items of inventory are displayed and an excel sheet is generated

Mobile Application:
This has two access levels:

a) Shop owner

1. Uploads an excel sheet containing details of products present in inventory
2. Scans barcode of products purchased by customer and generates a bill(pdf format)
3. To ensure security and authorization, bill is stored on IPFS (Inter-Planetary File System)
4. Updates inventory after selling of products
5. View line chart depicting customers with their purchase ranges in order to have better understanding of customer choices and make plans to increase thier sales accordingly

b) Customer

1. Buys products whose barcodes are scanned by owner and bill is sent to them
2. Can either pay in cash or UPI
3. Recieves QR-code for payment for UPI payment
4. Can access his/her bill history for future use
5. View line chart depicting bill amount with thier dates in order to analyse thier expenditure and take necessary actions

Challenges we ran into

There were quite a few challenges that we faced during development of our project :

1. Deprecation of scanner libraries : One potential issue in developing Billease is the deprecation of scanner libraries. This can cause compatibility issues and may require the development team to update or replace the existing scanner library with a newer version.

2. Creating a PDF buffer from JSON and uploading it on IPFS : Another potential issue is generating a PDF buffer from JSON and uploading it on IPFS. This can be complex and may require careful attention to formatting, system resources, and secure and reliable upload procedures.

3. Recreating the buffered PDF from the IPFS link in billing history section : The third potential issue is recreating the buffered PDF from the IPFS link in the billing history section. This may require validation of the IPFS link, integrity checks of the PDF data, and effective parsing and display of PDFs in the app. Regular monitoring and maintenance may also be necessary to ensure the billing history section remains functional over time.

4. Another issue was with generating SQL data to Excel as it is complex and technical knowledge required for the process.