Send receipts to BillyBox from your phone
May 2026
BillyBox connects to your email and pulls invoices automatically — that workflow covers the bulk of what a freelancer or small business spends money on each month. But not every receipt arrives by email. A café bill, a paper receipt from a hardware store, a hotel slip handed to you at checkout — those never reach an inbox you can connect.
The BillyBox Telegram bot is built for exactly that gap. Forward a photo, a PDF, or a vendor portal link to the bot and it lands in the same review queue as your email invoices, with the same vendor and amount extraction.
Why use Telegram
Email is still the main channel. Around 95% of what most freelancers and small businesses pay each month — SaaS, hosting, ads, utilities — arrives as an attachment or a payment-confirmation email. The Telegram bot is for the other 5%:
- Paper receipts from cafés, restaurants, taxis, hotels
- Hardware-store and grocery slips you photograph on the way out
- Vendor portals that email a link instead of an attachment
- Photos of utility bills that came in physical mail
- Any document a client or supplier sends you on Telegram or WhatsApp that you then forward across
If it has a vendor and an amount, the bot can extract it. The point isn't to replace your email connection — it's to catch the documents your inbox never sees.
One-time setup
Connecting takes about thirty seconds:
- Open BillyBox and go to Settings
- Find the Telegram bot card and click Connect Telegram
- On mobile, the deep link opens the Telegram app and starts a chat with the bot. On desktop, scan the QR code with your phone camera to open the same chat.
- Tap Start in the bot. It binds the chat to your BillyBox account and replies Linked.
That's it. The deep link is single-use and expires after 10 minutes, so nobody else can hijack the connection. You can disconnect at any time from the same Settings card — the bot stops accepting documents from that chat immediately.
What to send
The bot accepts the same document types BillyBox handles from email:
- Photos (JPG, PNG) — snap a paper receipt, the bot reads it with the same AI-powered OCR used for scanned email attachments.
- PDFs — forward a PDF invoice you received in chat or saved from a portal.
- XML invoices — useful for e-invoicing formats from jurisdictions that issue them.
- Vendor portal URLs — paste a link to a Stripe receipt, an AWS invoice page, or a hotel booking confirmation. BillyBox follows the link and downloads the actual document where it can.
You can forward multiple documents at once — invoice plus receipt for the same purchase, for example. BillyBox auto-merges the pair under one bill group so you review and classify them together.
Classifying from the bot
After the bot processes a document, it replies with a short summary — vendor, amount, currency — and three inline buttons: Business, Personal, Ignore. Tap one and the document is classified instantly, with the decision cascaded to any sibling documents in the same bill group.
You don't have to classify in the chat. If you'd rather batch-classify everything at the end of the month on desktop, just skip the buttons — the document is still queued in BillyBox and will appear in your monthly review with the rest.
What about email?
Your email connection still does the heavy lifting. Auto-fetch runs every evening and pulls every invoice from every connected inbox, just as before. Telegram is additive: it fills the gaps email can't reach, and it gives you a way to capture a receipt the moment you receive it instead of trying to remember weeks later.
If a vendor sends both an email invoice and you snap a photo of the paper receipt, the bill-grouping engine auto-merges them under one record so you don't see duplicates.