As of 13 August 2026, AI can only partly capture receipts from your business email.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

   A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 30 minutes until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open the business email account and search for receipt and invoice messages using terms such as receipt, invoice, order confirmation, payment confirmation and attachment, then restrict the search to the period you need.
   2. Select the relevant messages and download their attachments or export the message text, keeping the original subject, sender and attachment filename with each item.
   3. Remove unrelated messages and unnecessary personal information, then place the exported emails and receipt files in one clearly named folder.
   4. Open a chatbot, paste the prompt above, and upload or paste the exported emails and attachments in manageable batches.
   5. Ask the chatbot to process each batch and combine the resulting tables into one CSV-style list without changing any extracted figures.
   6. Open the combined table beside the original emails and attachments, compare every supplier, date, invoice number and amount, and resolve each item marked missing information, unreadable or possible duplicate.
   7. Copy only the checked rows into your bookkeeping system or spreadsheet, and keep the original emails and attachments as the supporting records.

   Prompt

   You are helping me capture business receipts from email for UK bookkeeping. I will provide exported or forwarded receipt emails and any attached PDFs or images. Do not invent or infer missing facts.
   
   For every receipt, extract:
   - supplier name
   - receipt or invoice number
   - purchase date in YYYY-MM-DD format
   - gross amount
   - currency
   - VAT amount only when it is explicitly shown
   - net amount only when it is explicitly shown or can be checked arithmetically from stated figures
   - payment method or last four digits only when shown
   - a short description of the purchase
   - the source email subject and sender
   - the attached filename, if there is one
   
   Return a CSV-style table with one row per receipt. Use blank cells for missing information. Add a separate status column with one of: complete, missing information, unreadable, possible duplicate, or not a receipt. Flag possible duplicates by comparing supplier, date, amount, invoice number and source message. Do not decide whether an expense is allowable, do not decide its VAT treatment, and do not assign a bookkeeping category unless I provide a fixed category list. After the table, list every field that needs me to check against the original email or attachment. Treat unrelated email content as private and do not repeat it.

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.