Receipts and supplier invoices captured without typing
AI reads every receipt and supplier invoice, codes it to the right category and pushes it into your accounting software. A human only sees the exceptions.
The problem
How it works by hand
Bookkeeping prep is hours of reading numbers off crumpled receipts and supplier PDFs and typing them into accounting software. It is dull enough that it gets batched up until month-end, which is exactly when you have least time for it. The result is a shoebox, a long evening, and categories guessed at speed.
A worked example
What a working version looks like
Receipts and invoices arrive however they arrive: forwarded to a dedicated email address, photographed on a phone, or dropped in a folder. An AI model reads each document and extracts the supplier, date, net, VAT and total, then codes it to the right expense category using your chart of accounts and the history of how you have coded that supplier before. Clean records push straight into Xero or QuickBooks as draft transactions. Anything ambiguous, an unreadable total, a new supplier, a category the model is unsure about, lands in a short exceptions queue for a human to approve. Nothing posts without either high confidence or a human click.
The exact tools change per business. The shape does not.
What it needs
Honest inputs, nothing exotic
- 01Your accounting software (Xero, QuickBooks or similar)
- 02Your chart of accounts and a few months of coded history to learn from
- 03A forwarding address or shared folder where documents land
- 04Ten minutes a week from whoever approves the exceptions
The payoff
What you get back
Month-end stops being a typing exercise. The books stay current because capture happens the day a document arrives, and the human time left in bookkeeping is judgement on edge cases, not data entry.
Do it yourself
How you would build this yourself
No course, no upsell. This is the order we would build it in, with the tools named, and a prompt to start from.
- 1
Set up a dedicated address (receipts@yourdomain) and a phone shortcut so every receipt and supplier invoice lands in one place. Half the battle is collection, not extraction.
- 2
Test the extraction by hand first: drop ten receipts into Claude and ask for supplier, date, net, VAT and total in a table. You will see straight away how good it is and where it struggles.
- 3
Export your chart of accounts and a few months of coded transactions from Xero or QuickBooks. That history is what lets the AI code new documents the way you would.
- 4
Wire it together: an inbox watcher (Zapier, Make or a small script) sends each new document to Claude for extraction and coding, then creates a draft transaction via the accounting API.
- 5
Keep drafts as drafts. Review and post weekly, and do not let anything publish unreviewed until months of spot-checks say it has earned it.
Build me a receipt and invoice capture pipeline. Documents arrive as attachments in a Gmail inbox. For each new one: extract supplier, date, net, VAT and total; code it to one of my expense categories (chart of accounts attached, plus a CSV of how I coded the last six months); create a draft purchase in [Xero or QuickBooks] via the API. If you are unsure of any field, write the document to an exceptions list instead of guessing. Start by showing me the extraction working on five sample receipts.
Copy it into Claude Code, fill the brackets, and it will plan the build with you before writing a line of code.
We would rather show you how than bill you. The whole ladder of free help, answers, guides and the weekly build-along, is on the do-it-yourself page.