Upload or forward a receipt

Add receipts, at the top of Expenses→, and the Receipts tab beside it, open the page that reads a receipt for you. It takes them in two ways.

• Upload it. If the file is already on the device you are using, choose it under Upload receipts, the first thing on the page. PDFs, photos and iPhone HEIC, up to 5 MB each.
• Forward it by email to receipts@email.sessional.co.uk, from the email address on your Sessional account. That is how we know the receipt is yours.

Either way it is read within the hour and waits in the same queue on the same page, with the vendor, date, amount and category already proposed. Check the figures, correct anything that is wrong, and confirm. That is when the expense is created.

The Attach link in the receipt column of an expense you have already typed in files the document against those figures as evidence. It reads nothing, and it is unchanged.

Add receipts is the other way round: it reads the figures and you confirm them. Both are available, and neither replaces the other.

• PDFs, which is what most email receipts are. Forward the email with the PDF attached.
• Photos: JPG, PNG and WebP. A phone picture of a paper till receipt is fine.
• HEIC, the format iPhones use by default. No need to convert anything first.

Up to five attachments per email, 5MB each. Anything that is not a receipt, such as the sender's logo in their signature, is ignored rather than turned into an expense.

Limits: up to 12 forwarded emails an hour, and up to 40 receipts waiting for review at once. When 40 are waiting, new ones are not taken in until you confirm or throw some away.

Forward a course or training certificate to the same address. It stays in the receipt queue, marked as looking like a certificate when recognised. Select This is a certificate to move it to your CPD evidence store→. The provider, title, date and hours are then read for you to confirm.

This applies to every emailed certificate. Moving it into your evidence store is your decision while signed in, because a From line can be faked. This is a receipt moves a file back if needed.

Receipts sent by a machine (parking apps, taxis, online orders, course bookings) are usually marked as automated mail, and a lot of systems quietly discard those. Sessional handles them before that filter, so forwarding a receipt straight from the app that sent it works normally.

The receipt reaches your account because of the address it came from. Your account address always works. If you take photos on a phone signed into a personal account, add that address on the Add receipts page and we will send it a link to confirm. You can have up to three extra addresses; remove one to add another.

Until that link is followed, nothing forwarded from the address arrives. That is deliberate: without confirming, someone could enter an address that is not theirs and have receipts sent from it land in their account instead of yours.

If a receipt arrives from a sender whose domain could not be verified, it is marked in the queue. Worth a second look before you confirm it, because it means we could not check the email really came from where it says.

Uploading a receipt needs only a verified email address. Forwarding by email also needs your name, a phone number and your invoice address on your profile, because an email sender can be faked and we have to be sure whose queue a forwarded receipt lands in.

Forwarding asks for four details. Your name, invoice address and email appear on your invoices. Your phone number is a contact detail and is not printed on invoices:

• A verified email address. Receipts are matched to you by the address they were sent from, so it has to be confirmed.
• Your full name. It goes on the expense record and on any invoice that follows it.
• A phone number. So we can reach you about anything unexpected that arrives.
• Your invoice address, including the postcode. The full address, not the postcode district your public profile uses.

All four live on your profile→. The Add receipts page shows which are still outstanding, ticked off as you add them, next to the upload control you can use in the meantime.

Images the reader flags as explicit, violent or an identity document are held back, hidden from your queue and not added to expenses. You are not notified about those images. An ordinary photo that is not a receipt can still appear in your review queue with missing or guessed fields. Use Throw away if it does not belong there; nothing becomes an expense until you confirm it.

A fuel receipt is not a mileage claim, and you should not claim both for the same journey. Mileage is claimed by distance at the HMRC rate. See expenses and mileage→.

Having receipts read for you, by upload or by email, is part of expenses, which is on Plus and Pro. See pricing→.