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 rct-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, rct-keep estimates how many receipt emails it can see and shows you the number before importing anything. A typical inbox with five years of online shopping returns somewhere between 200 and 1,200 receipts. You can choose to import all of it, only the last 12 months, or skip the historical scan entirely and only watch for new ones.

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 rct-keep account, tagged so you can see which inbox each one came from.

One pattern that works well: connect personal and work to the same rct-keep 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 matters more than you'd think

By default, rct-keep scans the whole mailbox. If your inbox is busy and you'd rather narrow it down, you can pick specific labels or folders during setup. People who use a dedicated "Receipts" Gmail label tend to keep things cleanest, because their own filter rules already pre-sort the mail before rct-keep ever sees it.

If you don't have such a filter yet, set one up while you're connecting. Five minutes of label-rule writing on the Gmail side saves hours of mis-classified receipts later.

What if rct-keep misses one?

It happens. Some receipt formats (especially HTML-only marketing-heavy ones) don't get recognised on the first pass. Two options: forward that single email to your personal forwarding address, or upload it as a `.eml` from the upload page. Either route gets it parsed the same way.

Disconnecting and reconnecting

Disconnect from Settings → Email connections. 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 Receipt Keep — start a 14-day free trial.