QuickBooks Online already has good receipt capture, and it is included in most subscriptions. Use it. What it cannot tell you is what is missing, because a receipt you never photographed leaves no trace anywhere. That is the half this guide adds: one question that lists every purchase and bill in your books with no document attached, and a way to attach the documents once you have found them. Finding the missing paperwork is still your job. Nothing here reads your inbox or your vendor portals.
How to scan receipts in QuickBooks Online
To scan receipts in QuickBooks Online you have three routes, all included in a standard subscription. On a phone, open the QuickBooks mobile app, select the Menu icon, then Receipt snap, then Receipt camera, and take the photo. On a computer, go to All apps, then Accounting, then Receipts, and select Upload from computer or Upload from Google Drive. Or create a forwarding address ending in @assist.intuit.com from that same Receipts screen, then email the document to it. QuickBooks reads the date, amount, vendor and last four digits of the card off the image, and holds the result in the Receipts tab under For review, where you either match it to a transaction already in the books or add it as a new one. Files must be PDF, JPEG, JPG, GIF or PNG, one receipt per file. Intuit documents this in Upload your receipts to QuickBooks, last updated 17 August 2026.
A few details from that article and from Email receipts and bills (updated 5 August 2026) are worth knowing before you set this up.
| Route | Where it lives | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
| Phone camera | Mobile app, Menu, Receipt snap | Newer iPhones save HEIC, which you have to convert first |
| Upload | All apps, Accounting, Receipts | From your computer or from Google Drive, one file at a time |
| Email forwarding | Receipts, Forward from email | One address per user per company, ending @assist.intuit.com |
The email route is the one that scales, because most receipts arrive as email in the first place. A forwarded message can carry several receipt images, as long as each image holds only one receipt, and the attachment has to be between 46 KB and 20 MB. Permission to forward is granted per user from Manage forwarding email on the same screen. Intuit also notes that receipt capture is limited on QuickBooks Online Free and Lite.
Then the matching. In the Receipts tab, the For review list shows how many existing transactions QuickBooks thinks each receipt matches. Select See suggested matches, pick the expense, select Match. When it finds nothing and you know a transaction exists, Search manually. This is a screen, and it stays a screen. An assistant does not tick these boxes for you.
Which expenses have no receipt attached
Here is the part QuickBooks does not answer. The Receipts tab shows the documents you gave it. It does not show the expenses that never got one. Those are the rows that hurt at year end, and they are invisible until somebody goes looking.
QuickBooks records which transaction an attachment belongs to, never the other way round, so the only way to know that a purchase has no receipt is to compare every expense against every attachment in the file. The connector does that comparison on the server in a single call, find_expenses_without_attachments, over purchases (anything paid from a bank or card account, including bank feed lines) and bills (payables). It returns one compact row per undocumented transaction, newest first: type, id, date, amount, currency, payee, account paid from, expense category, memo and document number, plus a count of how many are documented. The window defaults to the last twelve months and you can narrow it with a start and end date. It is a read tool, so it works on a read-only connection, which is what every Caribooks connection starts as.
"Which expenses this quarter have no receipt attached?"
Example output, on a fictional company. Studio Nord is a six-person design studio in Montréal.
| Date | Type | Payee | Amount | Paid from | Category |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-08-27 | Purchase | Adobe | CA$ 1,079.40 | Visa 4021 | Software subscriptions |
| 2026-08-19 | Bill | Imprimerie Rive-Nord | CA$ 2,340.00 | Accounts payable | Printing |
| 2026-08-12 | Purchase | Air Canada | CA$ 884.16 | Visa 4021 | Travel |
| 2026-07-30 | Purchase | Bureau en Gros | CA$ 213.87 | Visa 4021 | Office supplies |
| 2026-07-08 | Bill | Studio photo Lavoie | CA$ 1,500.00 | Accounts payable | Subcontractors |
Under it, the summary: 214 purchases and bills between 1 July and 31 August, 173 with a document attached, 41 without, CA$ 18,402.55 undocumented.
Read that list with judgment. Not every row needs a receipt. Payroll runs, tax remittances, transfers between your own accounts and bank fees are all expenses with nothing to attach, and the category column is what tells them apart from the Adobe charge you actually need to document. A useful second question, once the list is on screen:
"Ignore payroll, transfers and bank charges. Sort the rest by amount and show me the ten biggest."
That is usually where the real work is. Forty missing receipts sounds like an afternoon. Ten of them account for most of the money.
Attaching the documents you find
Now you go and find them, in your inbox, in the vendor's portal, in the shoebox. That part is manual and there is no way around it. What the assistant can do is put each document on the right transaction without you opening QuickBooks, which matters when you are working through a list of forty.
Two tools do this, and the difference is whether the document exists as a file.
attach_file takes a file you already have and attaches it in its own format: a vendor's PDF invoice, a photo of a paper receipt, a spreadsheet, a Word document. QuickBooks keeps the original format and file name. The limit is 10 MB per file. Hand the file to the assistant in the conversation and say where it goes:
"Attach this PDF to the Adobe purchase of 27 August."
The assistant confirms the transaction it matched, then reports back with the QuickBooks attachment id and the file name it used. If that transaction already has a document attached, the call fails and says what is already there, so a second pass through your list cannot quietly pile duplicates onto the same expense. Attaching another one anyway takes an explicit yes from you.
attach_receipt covers the case where there is no file at all, only text: an email confirmation, an order summary pasted from a web page. It renders that text as a plain PDF (sender, subject, date, then the body) and attaches it. You get a document where there was none, in a format an auditor can open.
Both are writes, so both need full access on that company. Every connection starts read-only, and the account owner switches a company to full access in the Caribooks portal. If you only want to know what is missing and plan to attach the files by hand, read-only is enough. Attachments can go on a purchase, a bill, an invoice, an estimate, a sales receipt, a refund receipt, a credit memo, a vendor credit, a journal entry, a payment, a purchase order, a deposit or a transfer.
Why the missing ones matter, in Canada and the US
In Canada, the Canada Revenue Agency states that you are generally required to keep your records for a minimum of six years from the end of the last tax year to which they relate, and it is specific about what an expense receipt has to show: the date of the purchase, the name and address of the seller, the name and address of the buyer, a full description of the goods or services, and the vendor's business number when they are a GST/HST registrant and the purchase price is $100 or more before tax. That is from Business records, page updated 31 August 2026. A bank line showing $128.40 at a supplier meets none of it.
In the United States, the Internal Revenue Service ties retention to the period of limitations rather than a flat number. Its guidance is to keep records for three years in the ordinary case, six years if you fail to report income that you should have reported and it is more than 25 percent of the gross income shown on the return, and indefinitely if you do not file a return at all (How long should I keep records?).
Either way, the expensive moment is years after the purchase, when the vendor's portal has rotated its history and the email is in an inbox you no longer have. Running the missing-receipt list quarterly, while the documents are still findable, is the whole point. Run it in the same pass as categorizing a month of expenses, or add it as a line to the month-end close checklist.
Where this is the wrong tool
The assistant cannot read your inbox. It sees QuickBooks and nothing else. It can tell you that the Air Canada charge from 12 August has no receipt, and it can attach the PDF once you hand it over, but the search through your mail is yours. A receipt it never sees stays missing.
Matching is your responsibility. When you say "attach this to the Adobe purchase of 27 August", the assistant picks a transaction and tells you which one. If two charges look alike and it picks the wrong one, the document lands on the wrong expense and the books now claim something false. Read the confirmation before you move on.
Fewer than a dozen receipts a month. Snap them with the mobile app as you go and skip all of this. The comparison earns its keep on a file with hundreds of transactions, not on a sole trader's card.
A formal audit or review engagement. Your auditor has requirements about evidence and sampling that a conversation transcript does not meet. Use this to arrive with fewer gaps, not to replace the workpapers.
QuickBooks Desktop. Online only, structurally, because Desktop has no API to connect to.
If nothing is connected yet, start here. The missing-receipt list runs on read-only access, so you can see the size of your gap before deciding whether to turn on writes. The QuickBooks MCP overview covers what else the connector reaches once it is set up.