How Extracto works
Ten short sections, start to finish. Read the first three and you can start today — the rest is here for when you need it.
THE WHOLE THING, IN SIX STEPS
- 01Sign upPhone, email, business name. About two minutes.
- 02Create a projectA name, a budget, and your BOQ if you have one.
- 03Add your teamA phone number each, and what they're allowed to do.
- 04Send receiptsYour site staff photograph them on WhatsApp. Nothing to install.
- 05Confirm themSomeone in the office opens each one and confirms it.
- 06Watch the numbersAsk the bot, or open the dashboard. Always current.
01
What Extracto is
Your people photograph receipts and send them to a WhatsApp number. Extracto reads each one and files it against the right project. Someone in your office confirms it, and the project's total moves.
The point is timing. A cost is recorded when the paper changes hands, not at month end when half of it has gone missing.
Nobody installs an app. Nobody learns new software. If a person can send a photo on WhatsApp, they can use Extracto.
There are two halves to it. On site it is WhatsApp and nothing else. In the office it is this website, where the figures are checked and read.
02
Getting started
Five things, in order. Signing up is about two minutes; the rest depends on how many people you are adding.
- 1Press Try for Free / Sign-up. Enter your phone number and the code that arrives on WhatsApp, then your email and the code that arrives there.
- 2Save the recovery key you are shown. It appears once, and it is what gets you back in if you ever lose your phone and your email together.
- 3Create your first project: a name, a budget if you have one, and your Bill of Quantities if the project has one.
- 4Add your team. For each person: their phone number, and what they are allowed to do.
- 5Ask one of them to send a test receipt to the Extracto WhatsApp number, then confirm it yourself in Transactions. That is the whole loop, once.
Carrying unpaid invoices from before Extracto? Enter what you have already paid when you create the project, then add the unpaid invoices from the dashboard whenever there is time. Each one typed in by hand needs a photo or a PDF attached, so have the files to hand.
BEFORE YOU START
I typed my phone number wrong.
Every code screen shows the number or address it was sent to, with a Change link beside it. Fix the typo there rather than starting again.
Do we have to pay anything to try it?
Signing up costs nothing: no card, no setup fee, nothing to pay before you have sent anything. From your first billing month the fee is 0.1% of the value your team confirms, with a minimum bill of AED 1,500 a month — or AED 12,000 paid once for a full year, which puts that minimum at AED 1,000.
03
Sending a receipt
Photograph the receipt and send it to the Extracto WhatsApp number. For the person on site, that is the entire job.
PROJECT - Tower B
Documents 3
Receipts 1,240.00 AED
Invoices 8,915.50 AED
Check the totals above.
Type CONFIRM to submit (3) documents.
[1] Add more receipts or invoices
[0] Exit
>> Reply with a number, or CONFIRM
CONFIRM
- 1Take the photo and send it. Receipt or invoice, either way.
- 2If that person works on more than one project, the bot asks which one. If they work on one, it does not ask.
- 3It replies with what it read: supplier, date, amount, VAT if the document shows one, and whether it is an invoice or a receipt. Then it asks whether that is right. The figure at the foot of the reply is what your reviewer has approved so far — what you just sent is not in it yet.
- 4Read the totals against the paper in your hand. They are re-sent after every document, so the last message always has the whole batch in it.
- 5If it all matches, reply CONFIRM — or تأكيد. That submits every document in the batch and closes the session, and nothing else in the chat does it.
Sending a document does not move a number. Everything arrives as Pending and stays there until somebody with Review permission confirms it.
Why "ok" is not enough
"ok", "thanks" and "yes" do not approve anything, and that is deliberate. Those are the words people send to say a message arrived — not to say they have read a figure and checked it against the paper.
So the bot asks for one specific word: CONFIRM, or تأكيد. Nothing else approves a batch — not "correct", not "no changes". Send it on its own: a message that also contains "thanks" or "ok" is read as courtesy. Capitals do not matter.
Replying CONFIRM is not the same as confirming the document in the office. It records that the person holding the paper says the totals match. A reviewer still has to sign it off before it counts anywhere.
Everything else in the chat is a number. 1 keeps the batch open for more receipts, 0 leaves and discards the batch, and every prompt prints its own options. There is no way to edit a figure from WhatsApp — corrections are made in the dashboard, beside the photograph.
IF SOMETHING GOES WRONG
The photo came out blurry.
The bot says it cannot read it and asks for another. Nothing is saved until it can read the document properly.
Somebody sent the same receipt twice.
Extracto recognises it — same supplier, date and amount, or the same document number — and asks before saving it again. And since a person confirms every document, anything that slips past the first check is caught at the second.
Somebody sent the wrong photo.
Nothing breaks. Send the right one as well. The wrong document sits as Pending until a reviewer rejects it, and a rejected document is counted in nothing and billed for nothing.
It read the amount wrong.
Whoever sent it can fix it in the same chat — the amount, VAT, supplier, date, document number or type. And the reviewer in the office can type over any field before confirming.
I sent a few, then went quiet.
After an hour with no message the conversation closes itself. Before it does, the bot sends a summary of what it saved and what it could not read. The next photo simply starts a new conversation.
I replied "ok" and nothing happened.
That is expected. Reply CONFIRM, or تأكيد. The bot will acknowledge the thanks and then ask again for the word.
04
Checking and confirming
Nothing counts until a person opens it and confirms it. This is the one job the office has to do, and it is the reason the numbers are worth anything.
Photo
- Supplier
- Al Maktoum Trading
- Date
- 14 Jan 2026
- Amount
- 1,250.00
- VAT
- 62.50
- Type
- Receipt
Everything that arrives — photographed or typed in by hand — is saved as Pending. Pending means Extracto has read it and nobody has checked it. It sits in the list. It is in no total.
Open Transactions and filter the STATUS column to Pending. That leaves only the documents waiting on you. Open one: the photo on one side, the figures Extracto read on the other.
- 1Check four things against the photo: supplier, date, amount, VAT.
- 2Anything wrong, type over it. Your correction saves as you make it.
- 3Confirm, and the document counts. Reject, and it never does.
Confirming is the moment a document becomes real. It joins the project total, it can be matched against an invoice, and it is what your fee is worked out on. Reject it instead and you are charged nothing for it.
The decision is final: a confirmed document cannot be un-confirmed, and a rejected one cannot be brought back. The figures are not frozen with it — a confirmed document can still be corrected, and the record shows who changed what, when, and that it happened after sign-off. If the amount moves before we have invoiced you, the fee moves with it.
IF SOMETHING GOES WRONG
I confirmed one by mistake.
You cannot un-confirm it, and that is deliberate — confirming is what bills you. You can still open it and correct any figure, and the change is recorded as having happened after sign-off. If the document should never have been there at all, message us on WhatsApp.
Our totals are lower than what we have sent.
Only confirmed documents are counted. Open Transactions, filter STATUS to Pending, and work through what is waiting.
05
Asking questions
Anyone with Ask permission can message the bot in plain Arabic or English. There are no commands to learn.
Write the question the way you would say it out loud:
It always names the project it is answering about, so nothing is ambiguous. It copes with supplier names spelled loosely, and with dates like "last month".
The figures it gives are confirmed figures only. Anything still waiting for review is not in them — which is usually why an answer looks low.
06
Your Bill of Quantities
Optional. Import a BOQ and Extracto tracks spending per cost code instead of only per project.
YOUR BOQ FILE
Preliminaries
Concrete Works
COST CODES
Preliminaries
Concrete Works
That turns "am I over budget?" into "which work item am I over budget on?" A project without one works exactly the same, minus the per-code view.
Importing it. There is a file picker in the create-project form. Excel (.xlsx) or PDF, up to 10 MB. Extracto reads out the codes, descriptions, units, quantities and rates, checks them against the totals the bill prints for itself, and puts them in a table you can edit before saving.
Several tabs. A workbook with a tab per trade is normal, and Extracto reads all of them — up to ten. Each tab's name becomes the section its lines sit under, so Preliminaries and Concrete Works stay apart on the dashboard. Hidden tabs are skipped. Past ten, it tells you which ones it did not read.
It can set the budget. If the BOQ is priced and you left the budget field empty, Extracto fills it with the BOQ total and tells you it did. It only ever fills an empty field, and only on a fresh import. Change it if that is not your contract sum.
Changing it later. Control Panel → the project row → BOQ. Edit any cell, add or delete rows, or import a different file over the top. Saving replaces the project's BOQ; cost-code links you already confirmed on past receipts stay intact.
Nothing is linked to a cost code until a person says so. Extracto suggests; somebody with Review permission confirms it, changes it, or rejects it. No budget number moves until then.
IF SOMETHING GOES WRONG
It read a column wrong.
Fix it in the table before you save. Every cell is editable, and rows can be added or deleted.
A whole tab is missing.
Check it is not hidden in Excel, and that the workbook has no more than ten tabs. A tab with fewer than three rows is treated as a cover sheet and skipped.
My file is an old .xls.
Save it as .xlsx first. That is the only conversion Extracto needs from you.
07
Matching payments to invoices
An invoice is money you owe; a receipt is money you paid. Linking the two is what answers "what is still outstanding?"
INVOICE
8,400.00
Confirmed
RECEIPT
8,400.00
Confirmed
Outstanding
Once linked, the invoice drops off your outstanding list.
Extracto proposes the links itself — same supplier, similar amount, sensible timeframe. Open Transactions and read the Match column:
A suggestion is never a decision. Until somebody clicks, the invoice still reads as outstanding. And only confirmed documents take part: a receipt still waiting for review pays nothing off.
IF SOMETHING GOES WRONG
I linked the wrong invoice.
Transactions → that receipt's Matched link → undo it. The invoice goes straight back to the unpaid list.
08
Who can do what
Four permissions, given per project. Review is the one that matters — it is the only one that makes a number move.
One person can hold several of these, and different ones on different projects. Every time somebody's permissions change they get a WhatsApp message saying what they can do now. Only your Admin can change them.
Give Review to somebody who will actually look. A project where everything is confirmed unread has exactly the same numbers as a project nobody checked.
QUESTIONS PEOPLE ASK
Who can see our documents?
Only people your Admin has added to your company, and only on the projects they hold a role on. The Admin is the exception: with Transactions and Analysis switched on, they see every project. A Submit-only person has no dashboard at all — their whole relationship with Extracto is the WhatsApp thread.
Somebody lost their phone.
For a team member, the Admin updates their number in the Control Panel. For an Admin, your email and your recovery key together let you update your own number — you need both, which is why saving the key matters.
We removed somebody by mistake.
Add them again with the same phone number and their original record comes back, history and all, rather than a second person and a removed-user ghost.
09
What it costs
0.1% of the value of the documents you confirm, with a minimum bill each month — or a year paid once, which lowers that minimum. No per-user fee, nothing hidden.
Sending, reading, correcting and asking are all free. The fee is worked out at the moment a reviewer confirms a document, on that document's own value. What the month is billed at then depends on which of the two plans you are on.
- AED 500
- AED 1,500
- AED 0
The AED 1,500 minimum is what turns the first figure into the second. The third is nothing because the first sits inside the AED 1,000 a year paid up front already covers each month.
A document you reject costs nothing. A document still waiting for review has not been billed. A month in which you confirm nothing still meets the minimum: AED 1,500 on the monthly plan, and nothing further on the annual one, because that month's share is already paid.
Your Admin sees the exact breakdown — volume and fee — in the Control Panel at the end of each month.
10
Anything else
The questions that belong to no single step.
Can we use it in Arabic?
Yes. The bot replies in whichever language you write in, and this site switches with the toggle at the top.
Does it handle VAT?
When a document shows VAT separately, Extracto records that amount alongside the total so you have it for your own filing. It does not file for you and it does not give tax advice.
Can I type a transaction in instead of photographing it?
Yes, from Transactions — but you still attach a photo or a PDF of the document. A typed row with no paper behind it cannot be saved.
What happens to our records if we stop using Extracto?
Closing the account locks it at once and deletes everything thirty days later: documents, images, projects, people. A real deletion, not an archive, and after those thirty days it cannot be undone. There is no download, so ask us for a copy on WhatsApp before you close it.
That is the whole product.
Signing up takes about two minutes, and your site staff have nothing to learn.