Smart Capture Module
Smart Capture
Paste the text of a bank or mobile money receipt — or share it straight from your phone — and it reads the amount, date, direction, and reference for you, ready to confirm as a real transaction instead of typing it all in by hand.
Start here
1Before you start
Smart Capture is for the receipt text your bank or mobile money provider already sends you — a GT Bank/Ecobank/First Atlantic Bank email alert, an MTN MoMo or AirtelTigo Money SMS, or anything shaped like one. Paste that text in and it does the reading for you.
Every field is pulled out with pattern matching tuned against real receipts — not a language model. That keeps it fast, free to run, and predictable: it never invents a value. Anything it can’t confidently find is left blank for you to fill in, never guessed.
Pasting or sharing a receipt only adds it to a review queue. It becomes a real Banking transaction only once you tap Confirm & Post — exactly the same as if you’d typed it in yourself.
2Add a receipt
In Smart Capture, paste the receipt’s text into Receipt text — the whole SMS or email, not just the amount. Optionally pick a Source (MTN MoMo, GT Bank, etc.) purely for your own filtering later; parsing doesn’t depend on it. Click Capture.
The parsed result appears below in Waiting for review, with a confidence badge showing how much it was able to read — see Confidence levels.
3Review & confirm
Each pending item shows the original receipt text above an editable form, pre-filled with whatever was found:
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Bank / MoMo account | Which of your accounts this belongs to. “+ Create New Bank Account…” is available right in the dropdown. |
| Direction | Money in or money out — read from the receipt’s own wording. |
| Amount & Date | Editable like any other field — always double-check these before confirming. |
| Reference | The receipt’s own transaction ID, used to detect duplicates (see below). |
| Category | Type to search your existing categories or add a new one — the same shared list Banking, Income, and Expense Entries use, not a separate one. |
| Contact | Optional link to a real Contact. The receipt’s own recipient/sender name is shown as a hint even when it can’t be matched to one. |
Click Confirm & Post to create the real transaction, or Dismiss to discard it without posting anything.
Pasting or sharing the same receipt twice — even from two different channels — is recognized by its own reference number and amount, and shown as already captured instead of creating a second entry.
Common tasks
Capturing several receipts at once
Backfilling a stretch of history doesn’t mean pasting one at a time.
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Several short SMS
Paste them one after another, separated by a blank line, and Capture splits them back into individual receipts.
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An unbroken run with no blank lines
Also handled — each message’s own reference number is used to find where one ends and the next begins, even in a continuous export with no separators at all.
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Several full bank emails together
Recognized by each one restating its own “a debit/credit transaction occurred” line, so one email’s internal blank lines (between its own label/value rows) are never mistaken for a message boundary.
Internal transfers between your own accounts
Moving money between your own MoMo wallet and your own bank account also generates a receipt — but it isn’t income or an expense, so booking it as one would inflate your P&L for money that never actually left the business.
When a receipt’s counterparty matches the name of one of your own registered bank/MoMo accounts, the review screen shows a notice and checks Record as a transfer by default — pick the other account involved, and it moves both balances with no income/expense category at all. Untick the box if the name match was just a coincidence and it really was a regular transaction.
Getting it to remember your habits
The first time you confirm a receipt for a given person or business, note the category and (optionally) link a real Contact. The next receipt naming that same counterparty pre-fills the same category, contact, and bank account automatically — no separate setup, it just remembers how you handled it last time.
Fixing something it got wrong
Every field on a pending item is editable before you confirm — correct whatever’s wrong and post as usual. If a whole receipt reads as low confidence (see below), it usually means the amount or direction wasn’t found at all; fill those in by hand and confirm normally.
Reference
Confidence levels
| Badge | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Looks right | Both amount and direction were found — check the details and confirm. |
| Some fields missing | Only one of amount/direction was found — fill in the rest. |
| Couldn’t read this one | Neither was found — the text didn’t match a recognized receipt shape. Fill in everything by hand. |
What this module doesn’t do
Parsing is one general pattern-matcher tuned against real GT Bank, Ecobank, First Atlantic Bank, MTN MoMo, and AirtelTigo Money receipts — not a hand-built template per institution. A format it hasn’t seen may come back low-confidence; the fields are still there to fill in by hand.
A few MoMo formats don’t include a date at all — those default to today’s date, so double-check it if you’re capturing a receipt after the day it arrived.
An individual salary payment sent by MoMo still comes through here as a regular transaction (learning your usual category for that person over time) — it doesn’t feed into the Payroll module’s own runs.