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Receipt photos to expense sheet, hands-free

Employees email a photo of the receipt; an Aivell reads it on the box — amount, date, merchant, VAT — categorizes the spend against your policy, flags anything over the limits, and books one clean row per receipt into the expense sheet. Receipt photos never leave your network.

Watch the demo

starts when: An employee emails a photo of a receipt to expenses@

The problem

Expenses are the paperwork everyone postpones. Receipts live in wallets, jacket pockets and camera rolls until the month closes — then someone in accounting spends an afternoon squinting at faded thermal paper, retyping amounts and arguing about whether a client dinner was “meals” or “entertainment”. Admin like this quietly costs companies around $17,000 per employee per year.

Cloud expense apps solved the typing and created a different problem: every receipt photo gets uploaded to somebody else’s servers. Receipts say a lot — who travelled where, who ate with whom, what was bought at the pharmacy. Plenty of firms would rather that stayed in the building.

How your Aivell does it

One habit for employees. Photograph the receipt, email it to expenses@. That is the entire procedure — no app to install, no portal password to forget.
The photo is read on the box. A vision model running onboard reads the merchant, date, amount and VAT — off prints, PDFs and phone photos alike. The image never touches the internet.
The spend is categorized by your policy. Travel, meals, supplies — your categories, your thresholds. A dinner over the per-head limit is not booked quietly; it is flagged to the approver you named.
The row is booked, duplicates are not. One clean line per receipt in the expense sheet, tagged by employee. A second receipt with the same merchant, amount and day gets held for a human eye instead.
Everyone gets a recap. On the first of the month, each employee receives their own list of what was filed — and anything unreadable was already bounced back with a request for a better photo.

The rules that make this work — limits, categories, who approves what — are yours, written in plain language. The guardrails do the rest: the Aivell can add expense rows but cannot touch past months, and it can only ever write to the person who sent the receipt.

The chore, as you'd write it.

No flowcharts, no code — a chore is just a message to your Aivell, in your own words. It shapes it into a solid, guarded procedure and follows it to the letter. This one:

Giulia Aivell · file employee expenses ● active

watch expenses@ for receipt photos and pdfs

read each receipt — amount, date, merchant, vat

categorize it — travel, meals, supplies, other

meals over €50 a head get flagged for Paolo

unreadable total or missing date? ask the sender for a better photo

same merchant, same amount, same day as another receipt — flag it, don't book it

add one row per receipt to the expense sheet, tagged by employee

on the 1st, send each employee their monthly recap

You

Got it — I'll start right away, and check with you whenever something needs a human.

Giulia Aivell

The tools it uses.

Connected with single-click passkeys — no copied tokens, no OAuth hell.

Email collects receipts, answers the sender

Documents & Vision reads crumpled photos onboard

Spreadsheets books each expense where it belongs

Sensible guardrails.

Every tool can be limited to exactly what this chore needs. For this one, you might set:

Spreadsheets Can add rows to the current month's expense tab. Rewriting past months is blocked.

Email Replies go only to the employee who sent the receipt — never to an address outside your domain.

Questions, answered.

Will it cope with faded or crumpled receipts? +

Mostly, yes. The vision model on the box reads thermal paper going grey, folded corners, handwritten tips and phone photos taken at an angle. When something genuinely cannot be read, it does not invent a number — it emails the sender and asks for a sharper shot.

Who sees the receipt photos? +

Only your box and your people. The image is read by a vision model running inside your office and then filed with the expense row. Receipts can be surprisingly personal — where someone travelled, what they bought at the pharmacy — and none of it goes to any cloud service.

Can it apply our expense policy, not just read amounts? +

Yes — the policy is the chore. Per-head meal limits, categories, which spend needs a named approver, what happens with duplicates. You write it the way you would brief a new bookkeeper, and change it by editing a sentence.

What stops it from booking the same receipt twice? +

A rule in the chore. Same merchant, same amount, same day gets flagged instead of booked, and a human decides whether it is a duplicate or two genuinely identical coffees.

Related.

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Approvals prepared for you — you just say yes

Expense, discount and purchase requests arrive pre-checked: case summarized, policy applied, one tap to decide. All prepared on your own hardware.

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Timesheets collected before the cutoff, not after

Hours chased, checked and compiled into one master sheet before the payroll cutoff — by an AI colleague that works entirely inside your office network.

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Aivells for accounting firms

An on-premise AI colleague for accounting firms: reads invoices, chases client documents, minds the tax calendar. Client files never leave your office.

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What is an Aivell?

An Aivell is an on-premise AI colleague: a small box that plugs into your network, runs its own AI onboard and takes the repetitive work off your desk. Prompts, documents, data — nothing ever leaves your office. Unplug the internet: it keeps working.

You describe each task as a chore, in plain language. Your Aivell turns it into a solid, guarded procedure and runs it in the background — with guardrails on every tool, a complete audit trail, and approvals in your hand when you want them. One-time setup, fixed monthly fee. No tokens, no overages.