LESCO Bill Scraper

LESCO Bill Scraper (Jul 2018) — Role: Team Lead & Developer. Developed to address a specific challenge faced by businesses and property management firms: the efficient verification of utility bill payments for multiple accounts.

Challenge: The manual process of verifying whether utility bills have been paid is time-consuming, prone to errors, and inefficient, especially when dealing with a large number of bills. The main challenge was to automate this process, reducing the time and effort required to check the payment status of electricity bills, thereby enhancing operational efficiency.

Solution: The LESCO Bill Scraper was developed as a Python-based automation tool capable of extracting consumer numbers from bulk PDF files and checking the payment status of bills on the LESCO website: • PDF Parsing: Utilizing Python libraries to extract consumer numbers and other relevant information from PDF files containing bill details. • Web Scraping: Automating the process of navigating the LESCO website, inputting consumer numbers, and retrieving payment status information using Selenium. • Data Management: Efficiently handling extracted data, logging payment statuses, and generating structured reports for further analysis.

Process: • Bulk PDF Processing: The system starts by processing multiple PDF files to extract bill details including consumer numbers using Python's PDF parsing libraries. • Automated Web Navigation: Leveraging Selenium to automate browser actions — navigating the LESCO website, inputting consumer numbers, and accessing bill payment statuses. • Data Extraction and Reporting: BeautifulSoup parses HTML content retrieved from the website, extracting payment status for each consumer number and compiling it into a structured report.

Technologies Used: • Python: Powerful libraries for PDF parsing and web scraping. • BeautifulSoup & Selenium: Web scraping and automated browser interaction. • Node.js & Puppeteer: Supporting backend automation tasks. • Amazon EC2: Deployment and hosting. • React: Frontend interface.

Impact: • Operational Efficiency: Reduced what was previously hours of manual work to just a few minutes of automated processing. • Accuracy: Minimized human error, ensuring accurate payment status verification. • Resource Allocation: Freed up employee time from routine checks to focus on more value-added activities. • Cost Savings: Enabled businesses to avoid late payment penalties and manage cash flows more efficiently.