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, so we weigh every message on its own merits to find the receipts in there.

Tell us which label holds your receipts and we skip straight to the good part: every ounce of effort goes into reading the documents that matter, and the results get sharper across the board.

Set it under Settings → Gmail → What we scan. Never sorted your mail? Do it once and it pays off every year after: search Gmail for your usual vendors, apply a label, then scan. Twenty minutes of tidying buys you a materially sharper 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.

What comes to you to confirm

Some receipts need one word from you, and we would rather ask than guess. Anything we are not certain about goes to your review queue, where it takes a click — never a silent assumption filed under your name.

• 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 — your deduction totals are only ever built from real figures, so those come to you with one field to fill in.
• Marketing that looks like a receipt. “Your order shipped” and “save $5 on your next order” come from the same sender and read alike. We lean toward showing you a borderline one rather than dropping a real receipt — dismissing it takes a click.
• Receipts you forwarded to us that are also still in Gmail. We match a forward to its original and collapse the pair. When two copies read differently enough that we cannot be sure, you get both and can merge them in a click.
• Mixed personal and business spend. A home internet bill is genuinely part business, and the split is yours to set — set it once and we apply it to that vendor from then on.
• Whether you were in business yet. We read each receipt on its content, so a laptop bought before you started freelancing still looks like a business purchase. You know your start date — mark those personal and they stay that way.

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.

Scale and timing

• We import up to 5,000 receipts for a single year on the self-serve plans. Got a bigger year? Email us and we will handle it with you directly.
• A very large mailbox takes a while to read properly. Leave the page whenever you like — the import keeps running and your receipts appear as they are found.
• We scan one year at a time, so you only pay for the years you actually want.

After the import

Most of your receipts land filed and categorized. The rest gather in a review queue, mostly needing nothing more than business or personal.

Clear it in bulk rather than one at a time. Group the queue by vendor, category, reason or date and decide a whole group at once. Queues are usually a handful of vendors repeated many times, so a few decisions clear most of it — and every vendor decision is remembered, so those file themselves next time.