Budgeting and expense management functions have evolved with new tools and conventions, which aim towards an even more fast-paced yet eco-friendly and sustainable future. Companies and brands of all sizes are going paperless, issuing e-receipts by email instead of traditional paper ones. People from all walks of life are looking towards accounting apps like SparkReceipt to automatically sort out and calculate their expenses for them.
If you’re someone who has already decided to step into the modern, civilized world of paperless accounting and is enjoying the convenience of SparkReceipt, here’s another tool for you to add to your arsenal: WellyBox.
Scanning Inboxes for Receipts with WellyBox
This powerful application can take care of one of the most arduous tasks you might face when you start organising your receipts and managing your expenses – which is finding and collecting all your past receipts. In fact, this first step is often what deters individuals and small business owners from taking the essential step of delegating the pre-accounting function to AI. The good news is that now it only takes a few clicks to complete this step. The days of having to tortuously sift through your email history are now over.
You can use WellyBox to automatically find and collect all receipts in your email inboxes, without you even having to open them. The app then organises the receipts with an accountant’s precision, and you can download them in your chosen format. Here’s how to do that in a few simple steps:
Go to https://www.wellybox.com/ and click the “Start Free Trial” button.
Sign up to WellyBox. Creating an account by signing up through Google is the quickest way.
Fill in some basic details like your name and your company’s name, if needed.
Connect a mailbox by selecting the Gmail account you want to be scanned for receipts.
You will be redirected to a dashboard where you can see the progress of the scan in percentage (%) form. This step can take some time depending on how many receipts you have buried in your inbox!
Select “View documents” to be redirected to the receipts WellyBox fetched from your inbox. You can browse them all by scrolling down.
Click “Select All” or manually select the receipts you want downloaded. Then export or save the selected receipts in your preferred format. You can download them as PDFs and zip files or even convert them to CSV or an Excel table.
The free trial allows you to instantly collect the receipts in your inbox for up to 2 months to the past. You can upgrade to paid packages for fetching receipts from 1-4 years and beyond, with the most basic of them starting from $9 a month (billed annually). The subscription packages include other features tailored to your needs depending on whether you’re an individual, business or accountant.
If you’d like to learn how to most effectively process your receipts further, read on.
Managing WellyBox Receipts using SparkReceipt
To further process those receipts into an another receipt and expense tracking app, you will need to use the “Email Forwarding” feature under “Settings & Integrations”. Add your unique personal SparkReceipt forwarding address there. Your inbound email address can be found under the “Email Documents” in the SparkReceipt’s main menu.
IMPORTANT: For best results, it is advised to set up email forwarding before starting an email sync since the email forwarding only sends over new receipts that are not yet synced.
If you already synced all your accounts however, no problem. From the Wellybox main menu, select Export, then Download as ZIP. In SparkReceipt, select the mass upload feature in the web app’s sidebar, then drag and drop the PDF files from inside the ZIP into the upload tool.
SparkReceipt will extract the data from the forwarded receipts and intelligently categorize and analyse your expenses.
How many times do you have to go through this process, you wonder? Normally, just once! Once you’ve collected the receipts from your inbox, you won’t need to use WellyBox again to retrieve invoices. Simply stay on top of the game and auto-forward your future receipts to SparkReceipt directly as they come.
If you want to cut down on expenses, most other expense trackers are significantly cheaper than Wellybox (minimum $108, billed annually). So it is possible to use Wellybox as a one-time thing, and then continue with setting up auto-forward rules to your inbox to forward everything to SparkReceipt or another app that supports email receipts.
Auto Forwarding Receipts to SparkReceipt
How to manually forward e-receipts to SparkReceipt
To forward emails to SparkReceipt, first identify your unique forwarding address in the app under “Email Documents” in the main menu. Save this address to your email contacts for easy access. When you receive an e-receipt, forward it to this personal forwarding address. SparkReceipt will process the receipt, whether it’s an attachment or embedded in the email, and you’ll receive a confirmation email once the receipt is successfully scanned and added to your account.
How to automatically forward future e-receipts to SparkReceipt
Setting up auto-forwarding rules differ a bit with each email provider, but here are instructions for the most common ones:
Use these instructions to set up your unique SparkReceipt address as an auto-forward address. Most of the email providers will require verification of the inbound address, and the instructions are sent to the forwarding address. In SparkReceipt, this verification email will end up in your “Documents” folder in the app. Use the instructions in the email to complete the setup.
IMPORTANT: Always make sure to include appropriate filters so you do not accidentally and unnecessarily forward your whole inbox to SparkReceipt. A good filter is usually composed of both the sender address e.g. billing@example-merchant.com, and a “subject includes” rule e.g. subject includes “[Billing] Your billing statement for…”. The formats depend a bit on the merchant in question, but are nearly always identical from month to month.
Conclusion
Whether you’re an individual or a small business owner, the transformation from the conventional to the eco-friendly need not be challenging or complicated, especially when apps like WellyBox and SparkReceipt have taken it upon themselves to do the tedious parts for you. These toolkits are a testament to the awe-inspiring power of AI, which is promising to become an indispensable part of even the most trivial tasks of our daily lives.
