Getting the most from a historical import

The single best thing you can do

Put your receipts in their own Gmail label, and point the scan at it. A typical inbox is mostly newsletters, shipping notices, promotions and personal mail. When we scan everything, we have to judge each message on its own — and some of those judgements will be wrong in both directions.

When you tell us which label holds your receipts, that whole problem disappears. We stop guessing which messages matter and spend the effort on reading the ones that do.

You can set this under Settings → Gmail → What we scan. If you have never sorted your mail, it is worth doing once: search Gmail for your usual vendors, apply a label, then scan. An afternoon of tidying buys you a materially better import.

What we find reliably

• Order confirmations and invoices from real merchants — the vendor, the amount, the date and a Schedule C category.
• Subscription and SaaS charges, which tend to be consistently formatted and are usually unambiguous.
• Receipts with a PDF or image attached — the document itself is read, not just the email body.
• A bill and its payment confirmation for the same charge, collapsed into one entry rather than counted twice.

Where it struggles

These are real limits, measured on real inboxes. None of them lose your data — anything uncertain lands in your review queue rather than being filed or thrown away.

• Emails with no amount in them. Plenty of vendors send “your invoice is available” and keep the figure on a portal. We will never invent a number, so those arrive for you to fill in.
• Marketing that looks like a receipt. “Your order shipped” and “save $5 on your next order” come from the same senders and read similarly. A few promotions get through.
• Anything you forwarded to us and also still have in Gmail. A forwarded copy and the original can both be found, and they do not always match up as the same receipt.
• Mixed personal and business spend. A home internet bill or a utility is genuinely part business, and we will not decide that for you. Those come to your queue so you can set a split.
• Whether you were in business yet. We judge each receipt on its content. A laptop bought two years before you started freelancing still looks like a business purchase to us.

What we deliberately skip

• Credit-card payments and statements. Paying your card moves money between two accounts you already own. It is not an expense, and counting it would inflate your deductions.
• Bills you have not paid. An invoice you owe is a commitment, not a deduction — cash-basis accounting deducts in the year the money actually leaves.
• Newsletters, calendar invites, spam.

Practical limits

• We import up to 5,000 receipts for a single year on the self-serve plans. If a year is larger than that, email us and we will sort it out directly.
• A very large mailbox takes a while to read. You can leave the page — the import keeps running and you can come back to it.
• We scan one year at a time, so you only pay for the years you actually want.

After the import

Expect a review queue. On a mixed inbox it is normal for a meaningful share of receipts to need a decision from you — usually just business or personal.

Use Review by vendor rather than working through them one at a time. Most queues are a handful of vendors repeated many times, so a few decisions clear most of it — and we remember each one, so those vendors file themselves next time.