Why construction receipts go missing
Construction spending happens in the field, not at a desk. A foreman fills the truck at 6 a.m. A carpenter grabs fasteners at the supply house between jobs. A crew lead buys a rental part on a Saturday. The receipt goes on the dashboard, into a jacket pocket, or into the cup holder, and by Friday half of them are faded or gone.
For a contractor on QuickBooks Online, the cost is bigger than one lost receipt. Job costing depends on each purchase landing on the right customer or project. Materials you can bill back to the owner need the billable flag and the image. When a receipt is missing, the charge either sits uncoded in the bank feed or gets dumped into a general account, and the job looks more profitable than it was.
ReceiptQBO is a receipt and bill inbox with AI that posts only to QuickBooks Online. For a construction company, its job is simple: get the receipt out of the truck the moment it is printed, and put it on the right job in your books. The broader overview of the product is on the QuickBooks receipt scanner home page.
Crews forward from the truck
Your company gets a forwarding address, such as [email protected]. Put it in every crew lead's phone as a contact. When they pay, they take a photo of the receipt and email it to that contact. That is the whole process on their side. No app, no login, no form to fill out in the cold.
Photos come through as JPG, PNG or HEIC, the format many phones use by default. Supplier invoices arrive as PDF. When the supply house emails a receipt with no attachment, ReceiptQBO reads it from the email body.
A short note in the email subject, like a job number or street name, helps whoever reviews the receipt confirm the right job when the store receipt itself does not say.
On the Company plan, up to five people can forward receipts into one QuickBooks Online company. Pick the five who spend the most, usually the crew leads and whoever runs purchasing. For more on forwarding, see email receipts to QuickBooks.
Fwd: Your Lowe's receipt
Forwarded email, 2 min ago
IMG_4471.HEIC
Client link, 9 min ago
Invoice #88213 from Sunbelt Rentals
Gmail filter, 22 min ago
38 files from October folder
Batch upload, 1 hr ago
Job costing with customer, project and class
ReceiptQBO syncs your lists from QuickBooks Online through the connection, then codes each receipt to them. For construction, the fields that matter most are:
- Expense account, such as Job Materials, Fuel, Tools, or Equipment Rental.
- Customer or project, so the cost lands on the job and shows up in job profitability reports.
- Class, for example Field Ops for crew spending, or one class per division if you run framing and remodeling separately.
- Location, if you track yards or regions. QuickBooks Online calls these departments or locations.
- Billable flag, for materials you pass through to the owner.
- Memo, for the job note.
Before your company is connected, ReceiptQBO uses a starter chart for contractors so the proposed accounts look familiar from the first upload. After you connect, it uses your real chart.
Every field gets a confidence score. Your threshold, 90 percent by default, decides what posts on its own and what waits for review. A fuzzy job match waits. A clean fuel receipt with a rule behind it goes straight through.
Fuel and materials on autopilot with rules
Most construction spending comes from a short list of vendors: two or three fuel stations, a lumber yard, a supply house, an equipment rental shop. That is exactly where vendor rules save the most time.
A rule like "Shell always Car and Truck, Fuel, class Field Ops" overrides the AI every time. Set one for each fuel brand your crews use and fuel receipts stop needing review. Do the same for your regular supply houses with the materials account you use.
Rules do not need to be written in advance. When you correct a receipt in review, one click saves the correction as a rule for that vendor. After a month of normal work, the regular vendors are covered and review is mostly about which job a materials run belongs to.
Our guide to vendor rules for receipt coding explains how to build rules from your own corrections and how to keep them tidy as vendors change.
Receipt
Ridgeline Hardware
Oct 3, $232.59
Card ending 0981
Bank line in QuickBooks
RIDGELINE HARDWARE #12
Oct 4, $232.59
Matched, 2 day window
Card charges, duplicates and subcontractor bills
Contractors often run several company cards, one per truck or crew lead. ReceiptQBO reads the last four digits of the card from the receipt and matches each receipt by amount within a short date window to card and bank lines already in QuickBooks. A matched receipt is attached to that existing transaction, so the bank feed and the receipt never become two expenses. Charges with no receipt show up on your missing receipts list, so you know which truck to ask.
The duplicate check matters on job sites, where two people may photograph the same receipt. The same file, or the same vendor and amount within three days, is flagged and not posted.
Subcontractor invoices are handled as bills. Forward the invoice PDF, and ReceiptQBO reads it as a bill rather than a receipt, codes it to the job, and creates a Bill in QuickBooks Online with the image attached, ready to pay on its due date. New subcontractors are added as vendors automatically. See scanning bills into QuickBooks for how bills are read.
Plans for contractors and their bookkeepers
A contractor managing its own books uses the Company plan: $49 a month, or $24 a month billed yearly. It covers one QuickBooks Online company, 300 documents a month and up to five people forwarding receipts.
A bookkeeper who looks after several contractors uses the Bookkeeper plan, $299 a month or $149 a month billed yearly, for up to 25 companies and 2,500 documents a month pooled. That plan adds weekly missing receipt reminders. Each week, on a weekday the bookkeeper chooses, the contractor gets an email listing charges with no receipt and a no-login upload link, which crew leads can use from a phone.
Here is an example of the time involved, using made up numbers. Three trucks, 15 receipts each per week, four minutes each to file and code by hand, is three hours a week. Swap in your own figures. Before subscribing, upload one receipt on the home page with no account and look at the proposed account.
How to set up receipt tracking for your crews
- Connect your QuickBooks Online company. Sign in through the Intuit sign-in so your accounts, classes, locations and customers or projects sync.
- Add the forwarding address to every crew phone. Save it as a contact named Receipts so a photo can be sent in two taps.
- Write rules for fuel and supply vendors. Set the account and class for each regular vendor, such as Fuel and Field Ops.
- Review job assignments for two weeks. Confirm the customer or project on materials runs and save corrections as rules where the vendor always means the same job.
- Check the missing receipts list on Fridays. Ask each crew lead for the charges on their card that still have no receipt.