Receiptor AI
Receiptor AI watches email, WhatsApp, iMessage and bulk uploads for receipts and invoices, extracts the data, categorises it against your chart of accounts, then files each document into Xero or QuickBooks with the original attached.
What is Receiptor AI?
Receiptor AI is a bookkeeping automation service that sits above your accounting system rather than replacing it. Its job is to find the receipts and invoices you have already received, understand them, and put them where your books need them, with the source document still attached.
You connect your sources once: Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo or any IMAP mailbox, plus a WhatsApp or iMessage number, with bulk upload for anything else. From then on Receiptor watches those sources continuously and looks for financial documents inside messages, attachments and embedded links — auto-discovery rather than another forwarding inbox. From each document it pulls the supplier, date, currency, total, tax, document number and line items, then categorises it against your own chart of accounts using purchase context and the decisions you made before.
Two mechanisms separate it from plain OCR. The first is entity awareness: several companies can share one mailbox and still be told apart, each with its own accounting context, routing and automation rules. The second is what happens when the tool is unsure. Rather than guessing, it sends a focused question through WhatsApp or an in-app review queue — was this hotel bill travel or a client meal? — and keeps the answer for future decisions.
Output goes to Xero or QuickBooks, where Receiptor first looks for a transaction that already exists and attaches the missing evidence instead of creating a duplicate. Files can also be routed to Google Drive or Dropbox, forwarded by email, or exported as CSV, PDF or ZIP, and a Mercury integration attaches documents to bank transactions.
Existing history is handled separately: a one-time retroactive scan, priced per email, recovers months or years of past documents in a single run. For technical teams there is a REST API with webhooks, an MCP server that Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and n8n can drive, and a public command-line tool. The publisher, Merlino, Inc., is a Delaware corporation started by two founders in 2023; it claims more than 7,000 users and over 550,000 documents processed.
What it does
- Find receipts and invoices inside messages, attachments and embedded links across every connected source
- Extract supplier, date, currency, total, tax, document number and line items from each document
- Categorise every document against your own chart of accounts using purchase context and earlier decisions
- Work out which legal entity a document belongs to, even when several share a single inbox
- Post to Xero or QuickBooks with the original attached, after checking for a transaction that already exists
- Ask a focused question over WhatsApp or the review queue when a categorisation call is genuinely unclear
- Backfill months or years of email history in a single retroactive scan
When to use Receiptor AI / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Receiptor AI is the right fit.
When to use Receiptor AI
- Accountants and bookkeepers who lose hours every month chasing missing documents across several client entities
- Small business owners who keep their own books and want the month-end scramble to disappear
- Founders and operators running two or more legal entities out of one shared inbox
- Freelancers, contractors and digital nomads whose receipts arrive by email and WhatsApp rather than on paper
- Finance teams already committed to Xero or QuickBooks who want the source document filed alongside every entry
When not to use Receiptor AI
- Anyone looking for a permanently free tool: the cheapest plan is 29 USD a month, preceded only by a 14-day trial
- People whose main need is clearing an old inbox backlog, since history is a separate one-time purchase rather than part of the subscription
- Teams whose ledger is neither Xero nor QuickBooks, because every other destination is a file export instead of a direct posting
- Companies looking for employee expense reports with approval and reimbursement flows, which Receiptor positions itself against rather than provides
- Buyers who require a signed data processing agreement, a named EU Article 27 representative or a current SOC 2 report before granting inbox access
How to use Receiptor AI
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Create an account in the Receiptor web app and start the 14-day free trial
- Connect your sources: Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo or any IMAP mailbox, plus a WhatsApp or iMessage number — the site puts this at around two minutes
- Set up your legal entities and give each one its own chart of accounts
- Connect a destination: Xero, QuickBooks, Google Drive or Dropbox
- Let Receiptor run, discovering and extracting documents continuously with nothing forwarded by hand
- Answer context requests in WhatsApp or in the in-app review queue whenever the tool is unsure how to categorise something
- Build automation rules that fire on arrival or on a schedule — the site's own example sets Stripe receipts to Software and sends them to Xero
- Order a separate retroactive scan, priced per email after a free quote, if you need to recover an existing backlog
- Publish or export the results: Xero, QuickBooks, Drive, Dropbox, email forwarding, CSV, PDF or ZIP
- For engineering use, generate an API key and plug in the webhooks, MCP server or command-line tool, all available from the Growth plan
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Capture is genuinely automatic: connected sources are watched continuously, so nothing has to be forwarded or uploaded by hand
- The original document stays attached all the way into the ledger, which is precisely what a generic OCR export loses
- Years of inbox history can be recovered in one pass, which makes onboarding a client or salvaging a late tax season workable
- Several legal entities can share a single mailbox and still be told apart, each with its own accounting context
- Uncertainty is handled openly: the tool asks a targeted question rather than guessing, and remembers the answer
- Data is stored in AWS EU regions and, according to the vendor, never used to train models, its own or anyone else's
- A full technical surface — REST API, webhooks, MCP server and a public CLI — is available for teams that want to build on it
Cons
- No permanently free plan: the entry point is 29 USD a month once the 14-day trial ends
- Historical email is not part of the subscription — the retroactive scan is a separate per-email purchase, and it is non-refundable except in exceptional cases
- Pricing is layered: modest included quotas then per-unit add-ons, so the real monthly bill can drift well above the headline figure
- Direct posting is limited to Xero and QuickBooks, with everything else handled as a file export
- Multi-entity matching, workspaces, API, MCP, CLI and webhooks all start at the Growth plan, 79 USD a month
- Formal security assurance is thin: SOC 2 is only in progress and the site itself says its CASA Tier 2 assessment has expired
- Documents and extracted data are kept indefinitely by default, and automatic deletion schedules are still described as in development
Pricing & Plans
There is no permanently free plan. Access begins with a 14-day free trial covering every feature, after which the lowest paid tier, Starter, is priced at 29.00 USD per month. Quarterly billing carries a 10% discount and annual billing gives two months free. A separate one-time product, the Retroactive Scan, is quoted per email and starts at 0.012 USD per email at the highest volumes.
- unlimited email accounts
- unlimited mobile scanners
- accounting export
- forward export
- built-in automations and memory
- includes 500 items checked
- 50 documents captured
- 50 agent queries and 1 accounting connection
- everything in Starter plus storage export
- custom automations
- workspaces
- legal entity matching
- API
- MCP and CLI access and webhooks
- includes 2
- 500 items checked
- everything in Growth
- with 10
- 000 items checked
- 1
- 000 documents captured
- 1
- 000 agent queries
- 5 accounting connections and 3 export destinations included
- everything in Scale plus advanced security
- custom authentication
- custom integrations and a bespoke SLA
- 0.025 USD up to 1
- 000 emails
- 0.020 from 1
- 001 to 10
- 000
- 0.018 from 10
- 001 to 25
- 000
- 0.03 USD per item checked
- 0.04 USD per document captured
- 0.01 USD per agent query
- 12 USD per extra accounting connection and 5 USD per extra export destination
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Receiptor AI handles your data.
GDPR overview
Compliance is claimed in plain words: the privacy policy states that Receiptor complies with the GDPR for all EU and UK users, and with the CCPA for California residents. Several concrete measures back this up. A Data Protection Officer is appointed and named, Romeo Bellon. Six rights are listed — access, rectification, erasure, objection, portability and withdrawal of consent — all exercised through a single contact address. Third-party services are listed by name and described as subprocessors under GDPR terms, and international transfers rely on AWS's Data Processing Agreement, with storage in AWS EU regions. Breaches trigger notification of affected users within 72 hours. Two gaps are worth stating plainly: no EU representative under Article 27 is designated anywhere on the site, and no data processing agreement is offered to customers themselves.
Who owns the data?
Merlino, Inc. presents itself as a processor of documents you already own rather than an owner of them. Your messages stay where they are: the site states that Receiptor never moves, deletes or modifies your emails, and that unrelated email content is never stored, only message identifiers kept to prevent reprocessing. Access to Google Drive and Dropbox is restricted to files the tool itself creates, and OAuth is used for Google, Microsoft, QuickBooks and Xero so no accounting password is held. Internally, only the two named founders may view customer data, for support, debugging or maintenance, and every access is logged. The company says it never sells, rents or trades personal information, but reserves the right to transfer data to an acquirer in a merger or sale, with prior notice and a deletion option.
Reuse rights
You can reuse what Receiptor extracts without asking permission. Data can be downloaded at any time as CSV files, PDF reports or a ZIP archive of every document, and pushed straight into QuickBooks or Xero. From the Growth plan upward, the API, the MCP server, the command-line tool and webhooks let you pull the same records into your own systems. Documents can be permanently deleted from the app without contacting support, email monitoring can be paused and resumed without closing the account, and the account itself can be deleted by the user, at which point all data is removed immediately. Nothing published on the site restricts what you subsequently do with accounting data drawn from your own documents.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
All data is stored on AWS infrastructure in Europe. The privacy policy names the EU region rather than a specific country, and states that data remains in EU regions regardless of where the customer is located. The database is MongoDB on AWS Europe, described as offline and not connected to the internet, with servers in private subnets behind AWS load balancers and gateways. Encryption is AES-256 at rest and TLS 1.2 or higher in transit. Access is role-based and logged, and multi-factor authentication is required for all internal systems. Automated backups run every six hours, are encrypted, stored offline and kept for seven days. International transfers are governed by AWS's own Data Processing Agreement. Note the jurisdictional split: hosting is European, but the publisher is Merlino, Inc., a Delaware corporation with a United States address, so the company itself sits under US jurisdiction. A CASA Type 2 assessment is mentioned and SOC 2 is described as in progress.
Where Receiptor AI works
Country-level availability.
Not available in
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Receiptor AI.
- Connecting a work mailbox grants broad read access; the stated use is narrow, but the technical scope is your entire inbox
- Automatic categorisation fails quietly — a wrong account can travel all the way into the ledger and surface only at close or under audit
- Extracted documents and data are kept indefinitely unless you delete them yourself, and automatic deletion is still unfinished
- Reviewing bookkeeping decisions inside WhatsApp invites fast answers to questions that deserve considered ones
- Stop reading what the tool files and you gradually lose the feel for your own spending that manual bookkeeping gave you
- Financial documents pass through third-party AI services — OpenAI, Azure and AWS — even though the vendor states nothing is used for training
- Cost is variable by design: per-unit add-ons above the included quotas make the monthly bill difficult to predict
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Low for the standard path. Connecting a mailbox takes about two minutes and runs through OAuth for Google, Microsoft, QuickBooks and Xero, with an app password or credentials for other IMAP providers; the site says a first client can be live in under five minutes. No technical skill is required. Setup takes longer if you configure several legal entities, separate charts of accounts and automation rules. The advanced surface — API keys, webhooks, the MCP server and a CLI installed via curl — is optional, genuinely technical, and available only from the Growth plan.
Deployment
Integrations
Behind Receiptor AI
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement Receiptor AI.
Frequently asked questions
How does Receiptor AI find my receipts and invoices?
Can it recover receipts from previous months or years?
What information is extracted from each document?
Can I manage more than one business?
What happens when Receiptor is not sure how to categorise something?
Where can my documents be sent?
Is my data used to train AI models?
Where is my data hosted, and how secure is it?
How long is my data kept?
Is there an API or an integration with AI assistants?
Should you pick Receiptor AI?
Receiptor AI solves a narrow problem that costs a great deal of time: finding and filing the receipts and invoices that have already arrived. It does not try to be an accounting package, and that focus is its strength. What distinguishes it is not the extraction model but the workflow around it — continuous discovery across email and messaging, categorisation grounded in your own chart of accounts, legal entity matching for people who run more than one business, and a posting step that checks Xero for an existing transaction before creating anything. Asking a question over WhatsApp instead of guessing is an unusually sensible design decision, and the feature most likely to change how the books look at close.
The trade-offs are real. There is no free plan, and pricing has two layers: a monthly subscription with modest included quotas, then per-unit add-ons that make the true cost hard to predict. Recovering an existing backlog is a separate purchase, billed per email and largely non-refundable. Direct posting stops at Xero and QuickBooks. Multi-entity handling and the entire developer surface begin at 79 USD a month.
On trust the picture is mixed but honestly presented. Data is stored in AWS EU regions and the vendor states plainly that nothing is used to train models, its own or third-party. Against that, SOC 2 is only in progress, the site itself notes that its CASA Tier 2 assessment has expired, no data processing agreement is offered to customers, no EU Article 27 representative is named, and retention is indefinite by default. Granting a small two-founder company read access to a business mailbox is a considered decision, not a casual one. For firms already on Xero or QuickBooks and tired of chasing documents, the hours recovered will usually justify it.
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