Connect Gmail (and add a second inbox later)

Most receipts arrive by email now. If yours do, the cheapest minute you'll ever spend on receipt-keeping is the one where you connect your inbox so they sort themselves.

What "connecting Gmail" actually does

It's a read-only OAuth permission. You're handing over a token that lets The Paper Keep look at receipt-shaped emails — order confirmations, tax invoices, subscription receipts — and pull them into your account. It can't send mail as you, can't delete anything, can't read messages that don't look like receipts.

If that ever feels off, revoke it from your Google account at any time. The receipts already imported stay where they are; the connection just stops fetching new ones.

The first scan is the longest one

When you connect, The Paper Keep estimates how many receipt emails it can see and shows you the numbers before importing anything. You then pick the import window — the last 30 days for the fastest start, 90 days (the recommended default), or a full 12 months of backfill — and hit Start Import.

The initial import runs at about 180 receipts an hour. After that, ongoing inbox scans look at new mail every few minutes — barely visible.

What to do when you have more than one inbox

Plenty of people end up with receipts split across two or three accounts: a personal Gmail, a work Gmail, an old Yahoo address that still gets old subscription receipts. You can connect each one as a separate inbox; receipts from all of them land in the same account, tagged so you can see which inbox each one came from.

One pattern that works well: connect personal and work to the same account if the work expenses are yours to claim (e.g. you're a contractor invoicing through a sole trader ABN). Keep them separate if work expenses go through your employer's system — you'll only confuse yourself trying to merge those.

Folder picking (for IMAP inboxes)

Gmail connections target receipt-shaped mail automatically, so there's nothing to configure. IMAP connections — Yahoo, iCloud, Fastmail, custom servers — let you tick exactly which folders to scan during setup. If your mail rules already sort receipts into a dedicated folder, point The Paper Keep at just that folder and it stays the cleanest feed you'll ever have.

You can change an IMAP connection's folders later from its Edit folders menu in Settings.

What if The Paper Keep misses one?

It happens. Some receipt formats (especially HTML-only marketing-heavy ones) don't get recognised on the first pass. The fix is simple: forward that single email to your personal forwarding address and it gets parsed the same way as everything else.

Disconnecting and reconnecting

Disconnect from Settings → Receipt sources (the ⋯ menu on the connection's row). The receipts that already came in stay; nothing is deleted. Reconnecting later starts a fresh scan, but the dedupe logic catches anything that was already imported, so you won't end up with two of everything.

This works even better inside The Paper Keep — start a 14-day free trial.