Expenses & receipts

Expenses are the other half of the money picture: the costs that sit against your income when Clerq works out profit. Log them as they happen, attach the receipt, and they flow straight into the profit report.

Log an expense

Create an expense with a description, an amount and currency, and a date. You can also record the vendor, a category, and free-text notes. Attach the receipt as a PNG, JPEG or PDF - it is stored inline in the database alongside the expense, so there is no object store to run and nothing to lose track of.

Scan a receipt with AI

Rather than copy the numbers off a receipt by hand, attach the image and press Scan with AI. A vision model reads the receipt and pre-fills the description, amount, currency, vendor, category and notes for you to check and adjust before saving.

The button only appears when the instance is configured with a Groq API key - see AI receipt scanning for the one variable it needs. On Clerq Cloud it is ready to use.

Privacy. The receipt image is sent to the AI provider only at the moment you click Scan with AI - never automatically, and never if scanning is not configured. PDFs are turned into an image in your browser first, so only a single page image ever leaves the instance. Scanning fills in the form; it never saves the expense for you.

Paid & unpaid

Mark an expense paid when the money actually leaves, or unpaid if you recorded it early. The status feeds the two bases in the profit report: unpaid expenses count on the accrued basis, paid ones on the cash basis.

Find an expense

The expenses list has a search box that filters by description, vendor or category as you type. The term lives in the page URL, so a filtered view is a link you can bookmark or share.

Expenses are fully scriptable over the MCP server: list_expenses, create_expense, mark_expense_paid, mark_expense_unpaid and delete_expense. Uploading a receipt file stays a web-app action.