BillyBox is an invoice management tool that connects to your email (Gmail, Outlook, Zoho, or any IMAP provider), automatically extracts invoice attachments, and lets you classify them as business, personal, or ignored. Export an organized ZIP for your accountant in minutes.

Yes. BillyBox uses read-only access — we never send, delete, or modify your emails. Credentials are encrypted with AES-256, data is hosted in EU data centers (GDPR compliant), and you can revoke access with one click.

How does the invoice classification work?

After BillyBox fetches invoices from your email, you classify each one as business, personal, or ignore using keyboard shortcuts (B/P/I) on desktop or swipe gestures on mobile. It takes about 3 minutes instead of 30.

What email providers are supported?

BillyBox works with Gmail (Google OAuth), Outlook/Hotmail/Live (Microsoft OAuth), Zoho Mail (IMAP), and any email provider that supports IMAP with an app password (Yahoo, ProtonMail Bridge, custom domains, and more). You can connect multiple accounts at once.

Is there a free plan?

Yes! The free plan lets you fetch invoices from 2 calendar months with 2 email connections. No credit card required. Upgrade to Starter or Pro for unlimited months and more connections.

How is BillyBox different from accounting software?

BillyBox handles the step before accounting — collecting and organizing invoices from email. It does not replace QuickBooks, Xero, or Wave. Export your organized invoices and feed them into whatever accounting tool you use.

Can I send receipts from my phone?

Yes. Connect Telegram once in Settings, then forward photos, PDFs, or vendor portal links to the BillyBox bot. They land in the same review queue as your email invoices and follow the same classification flow. This complements your email connection — email still does the heavy lifting; Telegram is for the in-person receipts your inbox never sees.

What can I send to the BillyBox bot?

Photos (JPG/PNG) of paper receipts, PDF or XML invoices, and links to vendor portals (Stripe, AWS, hotel booking confirmations). The bot reads the document, returns the vendor and amount, and gives you Business / Personal / Ignore buttons right in the chat.

Can I add receipts or PDFs directly from the BillyBox app?

Yes — and you don't need to install anything. Open billybox.app in your phone's browser (it's a PWA, you can Add to Home Screen for an app-like icon) and tap the camera button in the review screen. It opens the rear camera so you can snap a paper receipt, or you can pick a PDF from your phone storage instead. The document goes through the same extraction and classification pipeline as your email invoices. Works alongside email and Telegram — pick whichever channel fits the document you have in hand.

Why separate business from personal invoices?

Only business expenses are tax-deductible, and a tax authority can ask you to document each claim. Mixing personal and business spend is the most common sole-proprietor mistake: deduct a personal charge as business and an audit can reverse it with tax, interest and penalties; exclude a real business charge 'to be safe' and you overpay. Separating at collection time is far cheaper than reconstructing it months later.

How does BillyBox decide business vs personal?

BillyBox suggests a classification with AI (tuned to recall over precision — it would rather show a document than hide it), then YOU confirm with one key on desktop (B / P / I) or a swipe on mobile. The AI suggestion is stored for telemetry, but your final classification is what the export uses. For recurring cases you can set vendor rules (e.g. 'all GitHub invoices are Business') so you stop deciding every month.

What about ambiguous vendors used for both work and personal?

For a SaaS subscription or rideshare account used both ways, you decide per document. BillyBox shows every detail (vendor, amount, date, invoice number) so you tap Business or Personal in a second. There is no per-document business/personal toggle on a single mixed inbox in the other email-invoice tools — they treat everything as business.

What does the accountant receive after classification?

A ZIP with a Business folder (the deductible invoices) and a Personal folder (kept for your own records, excluded from the accountant handoff), plus a CSV with every extracted field (vendor, amount, currency, date, invoice number, classification). The Ignored folder holds documents you marked as non-invoices.

Business vs personal invoices: how to separate them for clean accounting (2026)

Updated June 2026 · For freelancers, sole proprietors & small companies

Quick answer: Only business expenses are deductible, but they arrive mixed with personal spend on the same card and inbox. The fix is to classify each invoice as Business or Personal at the moment you collect it — not months later. BillyBox suggests the split with AI and lets you confirm in one tap (B / P / I on desktop, swipe on mobile), then exports a Business folder your accountant can use as-is. No other email-invoice tool sorts by whose money it is.

If you’re a freelancer, sole proprietor, or run a small company, you probably use the same email, the same card, and the same service accounts for both work and personal life. The receipt from your rideshare app looks identical whether Friday night was a client meeting or a night out. Your tax authority won’t make that distinction for you — you have to.

Why the split matters

Two symmetric, both-expensive risks:

Deducting personal spend as business — on audit, undocumented or personal claims get reversed with back-tax, interest and penalties. At scale it can be treated as abuse.
Excluding real business spend “to be safe” — you overpay tax (and, where VAT applies, lose recoverable VAT). At €1,000/month of un-deducted SaaS, a VAT-registered operator leaves roughly €2,400/year on the table in recoverable VAT alone.

Your accountant can’t do this split for you — they don’t know whether that ride was for a client or the mall. You know. But you have to document it, not just keep it in your head.

The hard cases (where it’s genuinely mixed)

Rideshare — one account, mixed trips

A sole proprietor can get 40–80 receipts a month from one rideshare account. Some are client trips and professional travel; the rest are personal. Every receipt looks identical — same PDF, same sender, same structure.

SaaS — Notion, Canva, Adobe

A personal Canva account you also use for company material, or an Adobe subscription on your personal card used 70% for client work. One invoice, indivisible. Deduct all, none, or part? The answer depends on how you document the use.

Cloud — AWS, Railway, Hetzner

The same AWS account hosts company infrastructure and a personal side-project. The consolidated invoice arrives monthly — to deduct only the business share you have to be able to justify the split.

Apple — mixed App Store

Receipts from no_reply@email.apple.com contain both productivity apps (business) and games or personal subscriptions (Apple Music, TV+) — all on one Apple ID.

The manual method (and why it breaks)

Open email, download each PDF, open a spreadsheet, type the vendor, amount, date, add a “B” or “P” column, rename the file, move it to the right folder, send to the accountant. For 20–30 invoices a month that’s 30–40 minutes on top of collection — and it degrades:

Errors propagate — one rideshare receipt mis-tagged in January stays wrong all year unless you re-check
No history — three months later you can’t remember if that trip was personal
No consistency — this month Canva is business, next month you forget

How BillyBox does it

BillyBox collects invoices automatically from email (Gmail, Outlook, Zoho, any IMAP), then lets you classify each one into three buckets:

Business (B) — a company expense, goes to the accountant
Personal (P) — personal spend, kept out of the deduction
Ignored (I) — not an invoice (newsletter, notification, logo)

On desktop, press B / P / I — one second per invoice, 30 invoices in under two minutes. On mobile, swipe right for Business, left for Personal, down for Ignore. And BillyBox learns: if you tagged your weekend rideshare receipts Personal last month, the AI pre-suggests Personal this month — you just confirm. For fixed cases, a vendor rule (“all GitHub invoices are Business”) removes the decision entirely.

This is the part most tools skip. Email-invoice collectors like Gennai, RadarFacturi and GetMyInvoices treat everything as a business expense — there’s no per-document Business/Personal toggle on a single mixed inbox. BillyBox is built around whose money it is, which is the decision a sole operator actually has to make.

What the accountant gets

At export, BillyBox produces a clean ZIP:

Business/ — every business-classified invoice, original filenames
Personal/ — personal invoices, separated, for your own records
CSV — vendor, amount, currency, date, invoice number, and the Business/Personal/Ignored column

The accountant gets only the Business folder — no noise, no personal invoices mixed in, no “is this one yours or the company’s?” back-and-forth. The CSV imports into common accounting tools.

Sort by whose money it is, in seconds.

Try BillyBox free — 2 months free, no card, unlimited invoices.

FAQ

What if I classify an invoice wrong?

You fix it anytime. Classification isn’t permanent — switch Business to Personal (or back) up to export, and re-classify and re-export even after.

Does the AI classify on its own, without me?

The AI suggests based on your past patterns; you confirm or correct each one. Nothing goes to the accountant without your explicit sign-off.

Can I change classifications after exporting?

Yes. Classifications stay in your account — edit and generate a new export anytime. Only the latest export counts.

Do other tools do business vs personal?

Email-invoice collectors generally don’t — they assume everything is business. A few receipt apps approximate it with separate accounts or workspaces, but not a one-tap per-invoice split on a single mixed inbox.