inbox receipts to books

Managing business expenses across Gmail, local storage, and bookkeeping platforms is a manual grind that leads to missing deductions and reconciliation errors. This skill implements a resumable, ledger-backed pipeline that finds every receipt in a mailbox, backs it up locally, and delivers it to your accounting destination with verified proof of arrival.

What it does

• Automated Collection scans Gmail for receipts, invoices, and expenses for any given period using broad and vendor-specific queries.
• Local-First Backup saves every document to a local workspace before delivery, ensuring you have a permanent archive regardless of platform status.
• Verified Delivery moves rows to "done" only after confirming arrival in the destination (QuickBooks, Xero, Dext, etc.), catching silent failures and duplicates.
• Queue Management batches items requiring human input into a "Needs You" list to prevent constant interruptions during long runs.
• Three-Way Reconciliation audits counts across the mailbox, local files, and the destination to ensure zero data loss.

How it works

1. Initialize the workspace by defining the period, fiscal year, and target bookkeeping adapter.
2. Classify candidate emails as business receipts, excluded items, or "needs user" cases using the business profile.
3. Retrieve documents via attachment extraction, HTML-to-PDF conversion for body-only receipts, or browser-based link following.
4. Deliver and Verify receipts in batches, checking for bounces or throttling before marking items as verified in the ledger.

Frameworks & tools

The skill uses Python 3.9+ for ledger management and reconciliation, Google Apps Script for optional backend automation, and openpyxl for Excel tracking. It integrates with Gmail and any bookkeeping tool supporting email-in, upload, or API ingestion.

Why this beats prompting it yourself

Standard prompts fail when a session crashes or a destination silently rejects a file. This skill uses a persistent ledger.json as a single source of truth, allowing it to resume exactly where it left off weeks later without double-sending or skipping items.

Use cases

• Collect and prep an entire year of Gmail receipts for a tax accountant.
• Migrate expense history from a mailbox into a new Xero or QuickBooks instance.
• Audit a period to find missing invoices by comparing bank lines to retrieved receipts.
• Set up an ongoing Gmail-to-Dext workflow with monthly reconciliation reports.

Known limitations

Requires Python 3.9+ installed locally. Browser-based link retrieval may require manual intervention for sites with complex 2FA or bot detection. Body-only email conversion requires a PDF printer.