Email-to-receipt ingest

Your clients forward invoices to a unique email address. luca extracts the attachment, runs it through AI extraction, and files it as a receipt — no phone capture required.

How it works

Every luca client has a unique email address in the format:

clientshortname.firmshortname@luca.mobi

For example, if your firm short name is smithco and your client's short name is greenacre, their ingest address is greenacre.smithco@luca.mobi.

When an email arrives at this address, luca:

  1. Identifies the client and firm from the address
  2. Extracts every supported attachment
  3. Converts office documents (DOCX, XLSX, ODS, CSV, HTML) to PDF
  4. Runs each attachment through AI extraction
  5. Creates a receipt for each attachment, marked with an envelope icon to show it came from email

Setting up your firm short name

Go to Settings and set your firm's short name. This is the part after the dot in every client's ingest address. Choose something short and memorable that clients can type quickly. Common patterns:

  • Your firm name without spaces: smithandco
  • An abbreviation: sca
  • Your domain prefix: yourfirm

Short names must be globally unique across luca — you'll be told if your first choice is taken.

Setting up a client short name

Each client gets an auto-generated short name when you create them. You can change it on the client's page. Like firm short names, client short names should be short and memorable. They only need to be unique within your firm.

What your clients can forward

luca handles a wide range of formats. Tell your clients to forward anything that looks like a receipt, invoice, or supplier confirmation:

  • PDFs — supplier invoices, utility bills, online order confirmations
  • Images — JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, TIFF, BMP
  • Office documents — DOCX, XLSX, ODS, ODT, CSV
  • Email body itself — if there are no attachments but the email body looks like an invoice (mentions amounts, VAT, totals), luca will process it as an HTML invoice
Maximum attachment size: 20MB per file. Most invoices are far smaller than this.

What luca extracts

The same AI extraction that handles photo captures runs on emailed attachments. You'll get the date, vendor, total amount, net amount, VAT, VAT rate, supplier VAT number, payment method, category, and line items where present.

Viewing email ingests

On a client's page, scroll to the email ingest section to see every email luca has received for that client. You'll see the sender, subject, date, attachment count, and a link to the receipts created from each email.

Troubleshooting

Email not arriving

  • Check the address spelling. The format is clientshortname.firmshortname@luca.mobi with a single dot separator.
  • Confirm the firm and client short names match exactly what's in Settings and on the client page.
  • Some email clients add tracking suffixes — make sure the client is forwarding from a normal email account.

Attachment not processed

  • Files over 20MB are skipped.
  • Unsupported formats (zip files, executables) are ignored.
  • Password-protected PDFs cannot be read by AI extraction.

Wrong client received the email

This usually means two clients have similar short names. Update the affected client's short name to something more distinctive.

Privacy and security

Email ingest follows the same security and data handling rules as the rest of luca. Forwarded emails and their attachments are stored encrypted in your firm's data partition. No other accountant can see them. Read the privacy policy for full details.