AI Invoice & Receipt Import

• "Scan a purchase" — in the table actions on the Transactions page and on Source → Purchases. Commits a purchase transaction.
• "Scan an expense" — the same flow on Optimize → Expenses. Commits an expense transaction instead, so it never touches inventory.
• "Scan income" — the same flow on Optimize → Income. Reads a payout statement, consignment settlement, commission or royalty statement, or grant letter, and commits an income transaction. Like an expense, it never touches inventory.
• The queue — every upload, in-progress extraction, and waiting draft lives at Optimize → Document Imports, so you can upload now and review later.

Choose by where it should land, not by what the paper says. Both buttons read the same two document types — an invoice or a receipt — so a till receipt from a hardware store is fine under "Scan a purchase", and a supplier invoice for your booth fee is fine under "Scan an expense". The difference is the transaction each one drafts: a purchase adds stock to inventory, an expense does not. If you scan supplies in as an expense, your inventory won't move.

Income statements are read differently. A payout is a net settlement: you earned a gross amount, then the platform withheld fees and tax before depositing the rest. "Scan income" pulls those apart, records the gross as your income so your Schedule C gross receipts stay right, and checks its own arithmetic against the net the statement says was paid out — so a misread fee is caught before you save. Refunds come through as their own negative line.

Platform fees get their own expense. On the income review screen, "Also record platform fees as an expense" is on by default. It creates a matching Commissions and Fees expense so the fee actually reduces your profit. Leave it off and the income is still recorded at its gross amount, but the fee is not deducted anywhere — the statement stays attached to the transaction either way, so the figures are always on file. The companion switch for withheld tax is off by default, because most marketplaces collect and remit that tax themselves — that money was never your revenue, so claiming it as an expense would be wrong. Turn it on only if the tax was withheld on your behalf, in which case it becomes an expense alongside the fees.

The saved income transaction holds the gross figure only. Fees and withheld tax are deductions, so they are never written onto the income transaction itself — its total is the gross receipts the statement reports, which is the figure your Schedule C line 1 needs. The deductions live in the companion expense (where they reach your profit and loss) and in the attached statement.

An income source can be a vendor or a customer. A platform payout, consignment shop, or grant body is vendor-shaped, while a class fee, licensing royalty, or commission genuinely comes from a customer — so the income counterparty picker offers both, on the AI review screen and on the manual income form alike. If the source is new, pick Vendor or Customer on the toggle before saving; it defaults to Vendor, because no statement reliably says which it is.

These buttons only appear while the AI document capture toggle is on — see AI Features for the consent model.

You can upload a PDF, PNG, JPG, WEBP, or HEIC file up to about 10 MB. On a phone, the Take photo option opens your camera directly, so snapping an invoice at the loading dock works as well as uploading a PDF at your desk.

Long invoice? Capture up to 8 pages with the multi-shot flow — extra page photos are attached to the same import, and all pages are read together as one extraction, so a multi-page invoice still costs a single allowance unit or credit.

1. Upload. Before extraction starts you see exactly what the run will cost (for example, "uses 1 of your 25 monthly imports" — or 1 credit on Pay As You Go).
2. Extraction. "Reading your invoice…" — most documents finish in a few seconds. You don't have to wait on the page; the import continues in the Document Imports queue.
3. Review. A two-pane screen shows your original document on the left and the editable draft on the right, so you can compare line by line.
4. Confirm. Only when you commit is the purchase (or expense) transaction created — with the document attached to it — and your stock and costs updated.

Vendors that email their invoices can skip the upload step entirely. In Settings → Account Preferences, inside the AI Features card, the "Email-to-import" block (visible to managers, and only while AI document capture is on) has a "Create import address" button. It generates a private address unique to your account, shown in two flavors:

• "Invoices & purchases" — the plain address; attachments arrive as purchase drafts.
• "Expense receipts" — the same address with +expense before the @; attachments arrive as expense drafts.

Forward an email with the invoice attached (up to 5 attachments per email) and each attachment appears in Document Imports, extracted automatically if your allowance permits. For security, the sender must be a team member — mail from any other address is silently ignored, so the address is useless to anyone outside your team even if it leaks. You can copy either address, "Regenerate address" (the old one stops working immediately), or "Turn off" email import (existing drafts are kept).

Some vendors send the receipt as the email body with no attachment. Those are ignored by default — flip "Read receipts sent in the email body" (off by default, in the same block) to have body text drafted like an attached receipt. The body is read as text only: never rendered, and links inside it are never opened.

Each successful extraction uses 1 unit of your monthly document-import allowance (3 on Free, 25 on Maker, 75 on Artisan, 200 on Workshop) or 1 credit on Pay As You Go. The document-import allowance is a shared pool: invoice imports, expense receipts, and Snap-a-Sale captures all draw from the same count. Failed or unreadable extractions cost nothing, and when a flat-plan allowance runs out you can always fall back to free manual entry — with your file already attached to the new transaction. See AI Features for the full allowance and credit model.

• Foreign-currency invoices are flagged, not converted — the draft shows the document's currency and leaves the conversion decision to you.
• Unreadable documents fail gracefully — you'll see "We couldn't read this as an invoice" and a free manual-entry fallback with the file pre-attached. Nothing is charged.
• Stale items clean themselves up — uploads that sit unprocessed for 7 days are auto-discarded, an extraction stuck longer than 24 hours is marked failed, and failed or discarded imports are scrubbed after 90 days.
• Vendor memory improves over time — corrections you make (default tax category, currency, new-item category) are remembered per vendor and pre-applied to that vendor's next invoice.