Your online orders belong in your budget too: forward email receipts to ReceiptIQ AI

October 10, 2026 · 6 min read · ReceiptIQ AI 2.5.1

Open your budget at the end of the month and look for the things you bought online. The Amazon order, the app subscription, the phone bill, the flight. They are usually missing, because there was never a paper receipt to scan. The receipt exists, but it is sitting in your email.

ReceiptIQ AI 2.5.1 adds a way to bring those in: you forward the email to a personal address, and the order shows up in the app as a receipt, with every item sorted into a budget category, just like a scanned one. It does not connect to your mailbox, and you do not sign in to anything.

Turn it on

Go to Settings → Receipts & Money → Email receipts and tap Turn on. It is off by default, so nothing happens until you do this.

The app gives you a personal forwarding address that looks like [email protected]. If you would rather have something readable, you can choose your own name, for example [email protected].

One thing to know about a readable name: it can be guessed by someone else. That is why nothing sent to your address is saved until you have looked at it (more on that below).

Send the receipts to it

There are two ways, and you can use both.

• By hand. Open an order confirmation, invoice or e-receipt and forward it to your address, the same way you would forward it to a friend. This works in any mail app.
• Automatically, with a rule. If your email service can forward mail by a rule, point the rule at your address and you never have to think about it again.

Gmail example

In Gmail on a computer, first add your ReceiptIQ address under Settings → Forwarding and POP/IMAP → Add a forwarding address. Gmail sends a confirmation message to that address; ReceiptIQ confirms it automatically, and the confirmation code is also shown in the app if Gmail asks for it. Then create a filter for the senders you care about, for example from:amazon OR subject:order, and choose Forward it to your ReceiptIQ address. Keep forwarding itself switched off in the Forwarding settings, so only the filtered emails are sent.

With other mail apps, forward by hand, or use whatever forwarding rule that service offers. We have not tested every provider, so if a rule does not behave the way you expect, tell us.

What the app reads

If the email has a PDF attachment, that is what gets read. If not, an attached receipt photo. If there is neither, the text of the email itself.

What comes out is what you would get from a scanned receipt: the store, the date, every item and its price, the total and the currency. Each item goes into a budget category, so your online orders count toward the same budgets as your groceries.

You review everything before it is saved

Within about a minute, a list called “N receipts from your inbox” appears on Home. If you are impatient, tap Check now or pull down on Home.

• Everything starts ticked. Untick what you do not want. The rest is added; whatever you leave out is discarded.
• Receipts the app already has are marked “Already added”.
• A possible duplicate (same store, same amount, same day) is marked and starts unticked, so you decide.
• A receipt you deleted before can be added back if you change your mind.

One order, one receipt

Online shops send several emails per order. If you have a rule that forwards everything from a shop, the “shipped” and “delivered” emails for an order the app has already read are skipped, so you do not get the same purchase three times.

The same goes for families. If you use Family Sharing and the same order is forwarded from two phones, it becomes one receipt.

When the items do not add up to the total

Sometimes an order total includes something the item list does not show: a gift card used at checkout, or a discount that is not printed line by line. When that happens, the app adds one clearly labelled line for the difference so the total stays right, and it tells you before it adds anything.

Privacy: what happens to the email

• No mailbox access. ReceiptIQ AI never connects to your email and never asks for a login. Only what you, or your rule, forward to the address reaches us.
• The email is read once on our server and deleted right away.
• The extracted receipt waits encrypted, with a key that exists only on your iPhone, so we cannot read it. It is deleted when your iPhone collects it, and after 30 days at the latest.
• Saved receipts live on your iPhone only, like a scanned receipt.
• A limit of 50 emails a day per address.

The full wording is in the Privacy Policy, Email receipts section. You can turn the feature off in the same place where you turned it on.

Good to know

• On the free plan, emailed receipts count toward your 30 free receipts, the same as scans.
• This is for receipts that arrive by email. It does not replace scanning paper receipts, and it does not link to a bank. For a month of online spending that never produced an email you can forward, statement import still covers the gaps.

Questions

Does ReceiptIQ AI read my inbox?

No. It never connects to your mailbox. It only receives the emails you forward to your personal address, by hand or with a forwarding rule you set up, and it needs no email login.

Is it on by default?

No. You turn it on in Settings, Receipts & Money, Email receipts. Until then there is no forwarding address.

Will a forwarded email be saved without my approval?

No. Forwarded receipts appear in a list for review, and only the ones you leave ticked are added to your receipts.

Do emailed receipts count toward the free 30 receipts?

Yes. On the free plan, emailed receipts count toward the 30 free receipts, like scans.

For the rest of the app, see the first-week guide and the Features page.