Send receipts by email

• Forward the receipt to [email protected].
• Send it from the email address on your Sessional account. That is how we know the receipt is yours.
• Within the hour it appears under Expenses, on the Receipts by email page, with the amount, date, GST and vendor already filled in.
• Check the figures, correct anything that is wrong, and confirm. That is when the expense is created.
• When you confirm, choose whether the cost is your own deduction record or one to recharge to a workplace. Recharged costs are offered when you next build an invoice.

• PDFs, which is what most email receipts are. Forward the confirmation email as it is.
• Photos: JPG, PNG and WebP. A phone picture of a paper till receipt is fine.
• HEIC, the format iPhones use by default. No need to convert anything first.

Up to five attachments per email, 5MB each. Anything that is not a receipt, such as the sender's logo in their signature, is ignored rather than turned into an expense.

If the receipt states a GST amount, the reading shows it as a suggestion you can edit. The GST treatment of the expense (GST included, GST-free, and so on) is always your choice on the review screen, and it starts as Not classified until you pick one. If you mark a cost for recharge, the GST treatment of the invoice line is a separate choice you make when you build the invoice.

Receipts sent by a machine (parking apps, rideshares, online orders, course bookings) are usually marked as automated mail, and a lot of systems quietly discard those. Sessional handles them before that filter, so forwarding a receipt straight from the app that sent it works normally.

The receipt reaches your account because of the address it came from. Your account address always works. If you take photos on a phone signed into a personal account, add that address on the Receipts by email page and we will send it a link to confirm.

Until that link is followed, nothing forwarded from the address arrives. That is deliberate: without confirming, someone could enter an address that is not theirs and have receipts sent from it land in their account instead of yours.

If a receipt arrives from a sender whose domain could not be verified, it is marked in the queue. Worth a second look before you confirm it, because it means we could not check the email really came from where it says.

Four things, all of which already appear on the invoices you send:

• A verified email address. Receipts are matched to you by the address they were sent from, so it has to be confirmed.
• Your full name. It goes on the expense record and on any invoice that follows it.
• A phone number. So we can reach you about anything unexpected that arrives.
• Your invoice address, including the postcode. The full address, not the postcode your public profile uses.

All four live on your profile. The Receipts by email page shows which are still outstanding, ticked off as you add them.

The reason for asking is that receipts arrive by email, and an email sender can be faked. Accepting files only from accounts we can properly identify is what makes the feature safe to offer at all.

Every image is checked before you see it. Anything that is not an ordinary receipt is held back, is not shown to you, and never becomes an expense. You do not have to look at it, and you will not be notified about it.

A fuel receipt and a cents-per-km claim are different methods, and you should not claim both for the same travel. Kilometres are claimed at the ATO cents-per-km rate on the expenses page. See expenses and cents-per-km.

Receipts by email is part of expense tracking, which is on Plus and Pro. See pricing.