Wave Expense Tracker & Receipt Scanner — No Manual Entry

Real-World Wave Workflows

How ExpenseBot Exports Expenses to Wave Accounting

ExpenseBot uses Wave's GraphQL API. The report owner controls the entire flow, from selecting the business and paid-through account to confirming the final push:

1. Gmail auto-scan captures the receipt. Overnight, ExpenseBot scans your inbox for Amazon, Stripe, SaaS, airlines, hotels, and ride-share receipts. Gemini AI extracts vendor, amount, date, currency, GST/HST or sales tax, and line items.
2. Map against your Wave Chart of Accounts. ExpenseBot uses exact account matches where possible and AI to choose from the active expense accounts returned by your selected Wave business. Review the result before reconciling it.
3. Review the monthly batch in your Google Sheet. Every captured expense lands in your Google Sheet first — the source of truth — so you get a human review step before anything touches Wave.
4. Push through Wave's API. From My Reports, choose the Wave business and paid-through account. ExpenseBot creates one categorized summary withdrawal for the report. A Wave-specific CSV is not currently provided.
5. Inspect the result in Wave. Confirm the summary withdrawal, paid-through account, categorized lines, date, and total before reconciling it.

Receipt evidence remains in ExpenseBot and Google Drive. The Wave entry contains a link to the report, not attached receipt files.

Wave Receipts vs ExpenseBot: Two Different Workflows

Wave's built-in Receipts feature (available in the Wave mobile app, included free) and ExpenseBot solve two genuinely different problems. Understanding the difference helps you decide which to use — or, more likely, how to use both.

Wave Receipts is mobile-first, camera-driven, and manual. You open the Wave app, tap the camera, snap a photo of a paper receipt, and Wave extracts the total. It's great for the coffee-shop-and-gas-station side of a small business — physical paper, captured the moment you're handed it. The catch: you have to remember to do it. Every receipt you forget to photograph is a deduction you'll never claim, and Wave Receipts doesn't look at your Gmail, doesn't parse PDFs, and doesn't extract line items from multi-page invoices.

ExpenseBot is Gmail-first, auto-capture, and passive. The majority of modern small-business expenses arrive by email: Amazon, Stripe fees, Adobe/Figma/Notion subscriptions, Uber, hotel folios, airline itineraries, SaaS tools. ExpenseBot scans your inbox overnight, parses each receipt with Gemini AI, and hands you a ready-to-import batch. You never snap a photo, never forget a subscription, and never lose an e-receipt to an overflowing inbox.

The two tools complement each other. Use Wave Receipts for paper receipts you get in person. Use ExpenseBot for every e-receipt, PDF invoice, and forwarded email. At month-end the Wave Receipts captures are already in Wave, and you push your ExpenseBot report alongside them as a summary transaction. Between the two, the paper in your wallet and the receipts buried in your inbox are both accounted for — without retyping transactions by hand.

Connect ExpenseBot to Wave in Four Steps

You keep your books in Wave exactly where they are. ExpenseBot handles the part Wave leaves to you — finding the receipt and reading it — and hands the finished report over when you say so.

1. Sign in with Google and connect Gmail. ExpenseBot starts finding receipts already sitting in your inbox — nothing to photograph or retype.
2. Group the expenses into a report in My Reports, and check the lines you want to send.
3. Expand Accounting on the report card and choose the Wave tile. You log into Wave and authorize the connection through Wave’s official API.
4. Pick the Wave business and the paid-through account, review, and push.ExpenseBot posts one summary money transaction for the report. Anything you marked Omitted is left out.

Two things worth knowing before you start: Wave’s API requires an active Wave Pro or Wave Advisor plan, and the connection is owner-managed — an accountant cannot push a client’s report using their own Wave connection. Review the summary transaction in Wave before you reconcile it.

Wave Expense Tracker for Canadian Small Business

Wave is Toronto-based, and its Canadian adoption is deeper than almost any other accounting tool built for freelancers and sole proprietors. If you're on Wave in Canada, ExpenseBot is built for the tax realities you actually deal with — GST, HST, PST, QST, and RST — not a generic "sales tax" field that makes you reconcile everything at year-end.

GST/HST separation out of the box. Every receipt ExpenseBot captures has federal GST/HST split into its own column (Column O in your Google Sheet) and provincial sales tax (PST/QST/RST) split into a separate column (Column N) — so the recoverable portion is already separated when you prepare a return, instead of being buried in a single total you re-derive at year-end. Note what the Wave push itself does: ExpenseBot posts one summary money transaction for the report to the account you choose. It does not write per-line tax codes into Wave, so set the tax treatment in Wave the way you normally would, and use the split columns in your sheet as the backing detail.

Province-aware sales tax regime. Quebec's TVQ, BC's PST, Saskatchewan's PST, and Manitoba's RST each behave differently, and ExpenseBot applies the right regime based on where the expense was incurred. Ontario and the HST provinces (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, PEI) collapse federal and provincial into a single HST line. Alberta and the territories are GST-only. All handled automatically.

T2125 support for sole proprietors. At year-end, ExpenseBot generates a CRA-ready T2125 Statement of Business or Professional Activities populated straight from your Wave-categorized expenses. The same Chart-of-Accounts categories you use in Wave flow through to the right T2125 line items, so CRA filings take minutes instead of a weekend. Multiple businesses? Each Wave business gets its own T2125.

Wave gave Canadian freelancers free accounting. ExpenseBot gives them automatic bookkeeping to match — built for the CRA rules they actually face.

Wave Integration FAQs