Published
By the end of the month there is always a pile somewhere: crumpled receipts in your wallet, a hosting invoice buried in your inbox, a lunch bill you photographed on your phone and forgot about. Sooner or later someone has to turn them into records, with a supplier, a total, VAT and a date attached.
Lucanto gives you two ways to do that. The result is the same either way; what differs is who does the typing — you, or AI. This guide covers both, and it also covers the part most articles on the subject skip: when the paid option is not worth it.
Two routes, one switch
Both start on the Expenses screen, from different buttons.
Create expense opens an empty form for you to fill in. It is free on every plan, and that is very nearly all there is to say about it.
Upload expenses opens a panel you drag documents into. And here is the thing worth noticing before anything else: down in the bottom-right corner of that panel sits a switch labelled Extract automatically.
Leave it off and the document is simply attached to a new expense. The expense gets the Manual status, you fill the fields yourself, and nothing comes off your allowance. It is the same manual route as before, except the original is now pinned to the record — which you will appreciate a year later when someone asks.
Switch it on and the file goes off for processing, with Lucanto trying to read the supplier, the amounts, the VAT rates, the dates and the individual line items.
What "structured expense" actually means
This is not text transcription. What comes out is a record with separate fields, and that is what makes it useful afterwards — you can filter it, match it against a bank payment, hand it to your accountant as a clean export.
Specifically, it pulls out the supplier (trading name, company and VAT numbers, address, country — and creates the contact if you do not have one yet), the document details (number, issue, delivery and due dates, payment reference, currency), the amounts split into net and VAT by rate, the individual line items with quantity, unit and unit price, and the supplier's bank account when the document carries one.
That last layer is why capture pays off even where typing would take a minute. A supermarket receipt runs to fifteen lines, and by the time a human reaches the last one they have stopped paying attention.
Route 1 — by hand, free
Create expense, fill it in, save. There genuinely is nothing more to it.
It makes sense more often than you would expect. If you handle a handful of documents a month, you will have typed them in before you have finished thinking about allowances. For repeating payments at a fixed amount — rent, a software subscription — cloning last month's record and changing the date is the fastest thing available. On the Free plan it is the only route, since AI extraction is not included there at all. And sometimes a document is simply bad enough that a human has to stop and think too.
If you still want the original filed alongside the record, upload it with the switch off. You get everything manual entry gives you, plus the attachment. Not on Free, though — attaching files to expenses belongs to the paid plans, so there the form is all there is.
Route 2 — AI extraction
Upload the document with the switch on, and your part is done for the moment.
Processing runs in the background, so you can close the panel and get on with something else. The row in the list reads Extracting… meanwhile, the status badge moves through Pending and Processing, and when the result lands it rewrites itself to Completed without you refreshing anything.
Expect minutes rather than seconds. That cuts against what the word "automatically" suggests, but reading a document is real work and it takes a moment. The expense detail records exactly when the job started and finished and how many attempts it took, so you can always see what happened.
Once the document comes back, open it and read it through. The original is shown right beside the form, so you can compare fields against the document without switching windows. The summary header keeps a note that the document was imported by Lucanto AI — because a month from now you will not remember which numbers you typed and which arrived on their own.
One more thing worth knowing: when the extraction is unsure, it says so. If the line items do not add up to the total calculated from the document, a warning appears above the summary asking you to check. That is not a rough edge we did not get round to. An expense is an accounting record, and a person should be the one to confirm it.
The panel on the right gives you Replace for swapping the file, Extract again for running the job from scratch, and Download.
Some documents are read for free
Not every document needs AI, and Lucanto works through the options cheapest first.
It looks first for ISDOC — a machine-readable layer some systems embed directly into the PDF. If it is there, the invoice is read locally and exactly, because there is nothing left to guess at. More to the point: ISDOC does not count against your allowance, even with the switch left on.
Failing that, it tries a payment QR code, which gives up the amount, the payment reference and the supplier's account without reading the image at all.
Only when both come up empty does the document go for AI processing.
So if a supplier can send you invoices with ISDOC attached, it is worth asking them to. Better data, and no extraction spent.
What it costs
| Plan | AI extractions / month | Manual expenses |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 0 | unlimited |
| Starter | 5 | unlimited |
| PRO | 10 | unlimited |
| Business | 50 | unlimited |
On PRO and Business you can extract past the allowance; it is billed at €0.20 per page on PRO and €0.18 on Business. On Free and Starter the allowance simply resets at the start of the next period.
Once it is gone, the upload panel locks and says so. It sounds worse than it is — the manual route carries on and nothing is lost.
When AI is not worth it
This is the part you will not find in a competitor's article, and it is the most useful thing we can tell you.
With five documents a month, you will have typed them in before you have decided which plan you want. For repeating payments at a fixed amount, a cloned record is exact to the cent and takes seconds. When a supplier sends ISDOC, AI is a needless detour. And for documents a human also has to squint at — a faded thermal receipt is the classic — you will spend the same time fixing the result, only now you have spent an extraction as well.
Where it earns its place is exactly where typing hurts most: many documents, assorted formats, several line items each. The month thirty invoices arrive from thirty suppliers is the case it was built for.
Bulk upload
On plans that include bulk upload you can select several files at once. Each becomes its own expense and they are processed in parallel, so twenty receipts do not take twenty times as long as one. Each of them counts against the allowance separately, though — worth remembering before you tip a whole month into the panel.