Expense tracker France — suivi de frais professionnels pour auto-entrepreneurs
Your justificatifs arrive as email confirmations from a dozen suppliers. ExpenseBot reads them out of Gmail and writes them into a Google Sheet you own — in euros, all year, instead of in one painful reconstruction in April.
Quick answer: how does an auto-entrepreneur in France track frais professionnels without a full comptabilité suite?
Capture the justificatif at the moment it arrives instead of reconstructing the year later. ExpenseBot is an expense tracker that reads receipt emails from your Gmail and writes each one into a Google Sheet in your own Drive, with EUR as a supported home currency. Receipts in other currencies are converted at the transaction-date rate, with the original amount kept on the row. It captures the spend and hands a clean sheet to whoever does the déclaration — it is not a French comptabilité suite and does not file anything for you.
Suivi de frais professionnels — the problem for an indépendant
The frais professionnels of an independent in France almost never arrive as paper. They arrive as email: the OVH invoice, the SNCF confirmation, the coworking receipt, the Apple subscription, the client lunch paid on a card. Each one is a justificatif you are expected to be able to produce. None of them is anywhere you can find it in eleven months.
So the work gets deferred. In the spring, an auto-entrepreneur or a profession libérale sits down with a mailbox and a spreadsheet and tries to rebuild a year of spend from memory and search terms. The reconstruction is slow, it is error-prone, and — the expensive part — it systematically under-counts. The receipts you cannot find are the deductions you do not take.
The alternative is not more discipline. It is capture that happens without you: something that reads the mailbox continuously, recognises which emails are receipts, and files them as they land.
How ExpenseBot captures justificatifs from Gmail
You connect a Gmail account. ExpenseBot scans it for receipt emails, reads the vendor, the date, the amount and the currency off each one, and writes a row into a Google Sheet. You can also add receipts by photo or by uploading a PDF when a supplier hands you paper or you pay in person. See how the Gmail receipt scanner works for the mechanics.
The part that matters more in France than it does in North America: the spreadsheet is yours. It lives in your own Google Drive, under your own Google account, created with the access you grant at sign-in. It is not a record inside a vendor's database that you can export on request. If you stop using ExpenseBot tomorrow, the sheet — every row, every year — stays exactly where it is, and you can revoke ExpenseBot's access from your Google account settings whenever you like.
That ownership point is also the practical one. Your comptable does not need an account, a licence or a training session. They need a link to a spreadsheet, which is a thing every accountant on earth already knows how to open.
Euros, and receipts that arrive in other currencies
EUR is a supported home currency for France, so your totals, category breakdowns and exports come out in euros without you converting anything.
Foreign receipts are the interesting case, and independents in France collect plenty of them — a US software subscription, a conference ticket in pounds, a supplier in Switzerland. ExpenseBot detects the currency on the receipt and converts it using the exchange rate on the receipt's transaction date, not today's rate. Both numbers stay on the row: the original currency and amount as the receipt stated them, alongside the converted euro amount and the rate used. The rate itself sits in an editable cell, so if your card issuer applied a different rate you can put their exact figure in and the converted total recalculates.
More detail on that behaviour lives on the multi-currency expense tracker page.
Barème kilométrique — mileage for French indépendants
We publish a dedicated French-language page for the barème kilométrique, and that is where the current scale belongs. Read it there rather than trusting a figure repeated on a second page — a duplicated rate is a rate that goes stale.
What matters here is only where the kilometres end up. Mileage you record in ExpenseBot lands in the same sheet as your receipts, so the trips and the justificatifs sit together in one file rather than in a notebook and an inbox that never meet.
TVA and the justificatif — what actually ships
Be careful with claims here, so here is the honest version. ExpenseBot reads the tax amounts printed on a receipt and stores them on the row alongside the total. It has VAT- and GST-style handling built for the jurisdictions where we have verified the rules and can support them properly.
France is not one of them. ExpenseBot does not ship French-specific TVA compliance: there is no French chart of accounts, no FEC export, no URSSAF connection, no Factur-X or e-invoicing readiness, and no TVA return. If a tool tells you it does all of that for €9 a month, test the claim carefully.
What ExpenseBot does is narrower and, we would argue, the part that is actually painful: it captures the spend and the justificatif behind it, and hands a clean, structured, complete sheet to whoever does the déclaration — you or your comptable. Estimates — confirm with your tax professional.
What ExpenseBot is not, for a French reader
The French market is served by full comptabilité suites, so it is worth being blunt about where this tool stops. ExpenseBot is a spend-capture tool that feeds a spreadsheet. It is not a general ledger, it does no double-entry bookkeeping, and it does not file anything for you.
What it does
- Scans Gmail for receipt emails and files them
- Accepts photos and PDF receipts
- Keeps everything in a Google Sheet you own
- Works in euros, converting foreign receipts at the transaction-date rate
- Records mileage next to the receipts
- Hands your comptable a structured, complete file
What it does not do
- No FEC export or plan comptable général
- No URSSAF connection
- No TVA return or French TVA compliance
- No Factur-X / e-invoicing readiness
- No invoicing, quotes or payroll
- Does not file your déclaration
If you need those, you need a comptabilité suite or a comptable, and ExpenseBot sits upstream of them rather than replacing them. If what you actually lack is a reliable record of what you spent, that is the gap this fills.
A short glossary, both directions
Justificatif — the supporting document: a receipt or invoice proving a spend happened.
Note de frais — an expense claim or expense report.
Frais professionnels — business expenses.
Auto-entrepreneur / micro-entrepreneur — France's simplified sole-trader regime.
Barème kilométrique — the official per-kilometre mileage scale.
Comptable — accountant. Comptabilité — accounting/bookkeeping.
Getting set up
Three steps: sign in with Google, connect the Gmail account your receipts arrive in, and let the first scan run. The sheet is created for you in your own Drive and starts filling.
A free account starts with a 60-day free trial and no credit card. On a free account the initial Gmail scan reaches back 60 days, which is usually enough to see whether the capture actually works on your real suppliers before you decide anything. Scanning further back — the current year, or a completed past year — comes with a subscription or a one-time unlock. Current pricing for your country is on the pricing page; it is country-aware, so read it there rather than trusting a figure quoted on a landing page.
If you are an independent elsewhere in Europe, the same workflow is described for neighbouring markets on the Germany page, and the freelancer page covers the general case.
Questions fréquentes
Est-ce que ExpenseBot fonctionne en euros ?
Yes. EUR is a supported home currency for France, so your totals and reports come out in euros. Receipts that arrive in another currency are converted using the exchange rate on the receipt's transaction date, and the row keeps both the original amount and the converted euro amount, plus the rate used. The rate sits in an editable cell, so you can override it with the exact rate your card issuer applied if you want a row to match your statement to the cent.
Can I use ExpenseBot as an auto-entrepreneur ?
Yes. ExpenseBot captures your justificatifs out of Gmail and writes them into a Google Sheet you own. It is a spend-capture tool, not a French comptabilité suite: it does not produce a FEC file, does not connect to URSSAF, does not handle Factur-X or e-invoicing, and does not file your déclaration. What it gives you and your comptable is a clean, complete, structured record of what was actually spent.
Où sont stockées mes données ?
In a Google Sheet in your own Google Drive, under your own Google account. ExpenseBot writes to that file with the access you grant during sign-in, and you can revoke that access at any time from your Google account settings. The spreadsheet remains yours whether or not you keep using ExpenseBot.
Est-ce que le barème kilométrique est géré ?
We publish a dedicated French page for the barème kilométrique — read that page for the current scale rather than a figure quoted here. Mileage you record in ExpenseBot lands in the same sheet as the rest of your expenses, so the kilometres and the receipts stay in one place.
Does ExpenseBot replace my accounting software ?
No, and it is not trying to. ExpenseBot solves the manual part — getting every justificatif out of your inbox and into a structured sheet. It hands that sheet to whatever you or your comptable already use. If you need invoicing, payroll, a plan comptable général or a déclaration filed, you still need those tools; ExpenseBot sits upstream of them.
I am an English-speaking freelancer living in France. Is this for me?
Yes. The ExpenseBot interface is in English, while French receipts are read and categorised normally — vendor names from French suppliers are recognised like any other. If you keep your own books in France and think in euros but read in English, this page describes exactly your situation.
Does ExpenseBot handle TVA?
ExpenseBot extracts the tax amounts printed on your receipts and stores them on the row, and it has VAT/GST-style handling built for the countries where we have verified the rules. We do not ship French-specific TVA compliance: no French chart of accounts, no TVA return, no e-invoicing readiness. Treat ExpenseBot as the layer that captures the justificatif and the amount, and leave the déclaration to you or your comptable. Estimates — confirm with your tax professional.
Stop rebuilding the year in April
Connect Gmail once and let the justificatifs file themselves into a sheet you own.