"Not specified" means we couldn't find the vendor's name and chose not to guess it.
That's deliberate. A merchant name on a tax-deductible expense ends up in your books, your reports, and potentially in front of an accountant or an auditor. We would rather leave one field blank for you to fill in than write a plausible- looking vendor name that turns out to be wrong. Everything else on the row — the amount, the date, the category, the receipt link — is extracted normally.
Why it happens
Almost every receipt prints the vendor's name somewhere: a logo, a header, a "thank you for shopping at…" line. A small number of charge notifications don't. These tend to be:
- Auto-reload / top-up confirmations — "Your credit balance has been reloaded. We charged $84.84 to your saved payment method."
- Subscription renewals — "Your plan renewed" with no company name in the body
- Bare card-charge notices — "A charge was made to your card ending 4242"
In those emails the vendor's identity often lives only in the sender address, not in the message itself. When there is genuinely no name to read, you get "Not specified" rather than a guess.
How to fix it (10 seconds)
In the app — recommended:
- Go to My Reports → Review expenses
- Find the expense (the amount and date are correct, so it's easy to spot)
- Click the merchant field and type the correct name
- Not sure who it was? Open the receipt from the same row to see the original email
The Review screen is a live view of your Google Sheet, so your edit is saved straight to the sheet. ExpenseBot never overwrites a merchant name you've typed — your corrections are permanent.
In your Google Sheet — same result:
Open your ExpenseBot spreadsheet and type the vendor name into column B (Merchant) on that row. Column J on the same row links to the original receipt if you need to check. Edits in either place stay in sync.
Will it keep happening?
It should be rare, and it got rarer. ExpenseBot now reads the sender's identity
when a charge notification doesn't name the vendor in its body — an email from
OpenAI <noreply@…openai.com> is recorded as OpenAI automatically. Only
genuinely anonymous documents still fall back to "Not specified".
If you're seeing it on many expenses rather than the occasional one, that's not normal — reply to any ExpenseBot email or contact support and we'll look at the specific receipts.