Software for accountants who are tired of chasing client receipts
You already have a ledger, a practice suite and a workflow tool. What you do not have is a reliable way to get source documents out of the clients who never reply. That is the only thing this does.
Accountant access is free · 60-day free trial for your client · No credit card
Quick answer: what does ExpenseBot do for an accounting practice?
ExpenseBot is source-document capture for accountants: your client connects their Gmail once, and their receipts are read overnight — vendor, date, tax and total — into a Google Sheet in the client's own Drive that you can open free, with no per-seat licence for the practice. It exports to Xero and QuickBooks so the data lands in the ledger you already run them on. It is deliberately not practice management: no workflow, no time and billing, no tax prep and no filing.
What software for accountants actually has to solve — the chasing problem
The expensive part of a small-client engagement is rarely the accounting. It is the weeks of back-and-forth before you have anything to account for: the first email, the reminder, the text message, the partial envelope of receipts, the follow-up about the eight that are missing, and the client who genuinely believes they already sent them.
Most tools sold into practices assume the documents have arrived. They optimise what happens after — coding, review, workflow, sign-off. The bottleneck sits earlier than that, and it is not a discipline problem on the client's side so much as a design problem: you are asking a busy person to perform a manual collection task every month, and the task is the failure point.
The way out is to stop asking. If the receipts are already in the client's inbox — and for most small businesses now, they are — then collection can be something that happens to them rather than something they do.
How client receipts arrive without you chasing
The client connects their Gmail once, at onboarding. After that, ExpenseBot reads the receipt and invoice emails in that inbox overnight, extracts the vendor, date, tax and total from each, assigns a category, and writes a row into a Google Sheet in the client's own Drive — with a link back to the original document. Paper and cash receipts go in by photo.
You are given access to that sheet. Free — there is no per-seat licence for the practice, and no charge that scales with the size of your book.
| On the 5th of the month | Today | With capture running |
|---|---|---|
| What you open | Your sent folder, to see who has not replied yet. | A populated sheet, with last month already in it. |
| What the client did | Meant to send the receipts. Did not. | Nothing this month. They connected an inbox once. |
| What is still on you | Chasing, then coding, then review. | Coding decisions and review — the part that is actually your job. |
Where this fits alongside your practice management software
To be direct about it: ExpenseBot is not practice management software and is not trying to become it. No job workflow, no time and billing, no client portal for engagement letters, no tax prep, no filing. If you are shopping for a practice suite, this is not one, and you should not evaluate it as one.
It sits upstream of all of that, at source-document capture — the stage before anything reaches your workflow tool. Your practice management software still runs the practice; this just makes sure it has something to run on.
That boundary is the point. A capture tool that also claimed to be a practice suite would be worse at both, and you would find that out three months into the engagement.
Working across a book of clients
Each client's records live in that client's own Google Drive rather than being pooled into a single store we hold. You are given access to each one and switch between them. Two practical consequences worth knowing before you roll it out:
- Offboarding is clean. A client who leaves keeps their own sheet, in their own Drive. There is no extraction request and no data of theirs left sitting in your systems.
- Access is per-client and explicit. You hold access to the clients you have been given access to, which is the same model as any other shared Drive file.
If your book is mostly QuickBooks and you want the multi-client mechanics specifically, the bookkeeper page covers that workflow rather than repeating it here. There is also a page on Gmail receipts for accountants.
Xero and QuickBooks, by market
Whichever ledger your practice standardised on, the capture layer should not force a change. There is one-click export to both Xero and QuickBooks.
In the UK and Australia that will usually mean Xero — it is the default in most practices we talk to in those markets. In the US and Canada it is more often QuickBooks. Both paths are supported, and a mixed book is fine: the export is chosen per client, not per practice.
If a client is coming off QuickBooks Self-Employed, the QuickBooks Self-Employed comparison covers what changes for them.
What it does not do
Worth being explicit, because you will find out anyway and it is better that you find out here:
- No tax preparation and no filing. Nothing is submitted to any authority.
- No workflow, no time and billing. That is your practice suite's job.
- No general ledger. There is no double-entry behind it; it is capture and categorisation feeding your ledger.
- No judgement. Categorisation is consistent, not authoritative. Treatment, deductibility and anything contentious stays with you — as it should.
- Cash without a receipt. If the client has no document and takes no photo, there is nothing to read.
Related: for accountants · AI bookkeeping · pricing
Try it on one difficult client
Pick the client you chase hardest. They connect Gmail once; you open the sheet free. A 60-day trial with no credit card is long enough to cover two month-ends.
Start free — no credit cardFrequently asked questions
Is this practice management software?
No. It handles source-document capture — getting client receipts in and categorised. Your practice management, workflow, time and billing, and filing all stay exactly where they are. ExpenseBot sits upstream of them.
Do I need a licence for every client?
No — accountant access is free. Your client subscribes; you are given access to their sheet at no cost to the practice.
Does it work with Xero and QuickBooks?
Yes, one-click export to both. In practice that means the capture happens in ExpenseBot and the data lands in whichever ledger you already run the client on.
Where does my client's data live?
In a Google Sheet in your client's own Google Drive. They own the file; you are given access to it. It is not pooled with other clients' data, and it does not sit in a database only we can read.
What about clients who never send anything?
That is the case this is built for. Once the client connects their Gmail one time, receipts are collected without them doing anything further — which removes the step they were failing at.
Does it do tax preparation or filing?
No. No tax prep, no filing, no returns. It produces clean, categorised source records with links back to the original documents; what you do with them is your work.
Can I use it across a whole book of clients?
Yes. Each client's records stay in that client's own Drive rather than being pooled, and you switch between them. The multi-client QuickBooks workflow is covered in more detail on our bookkeeper page.