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.
- 04Add documentsPhotographed on site, or attached at a desk. Nothing to install.
- 05Confirm themSomeone in the office opens each one and confirms it.
- 06Bring in your subcontractorsThey raise their own invoices, into the same review queue.
01
What Extracto is
Your people photograph receipts and add them from their phones. Your subcontractors raise their invoices themselves. Extracto reads each document and files it against the right project, somebody 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. A person on site opens a link, enters a code sent to their phone, and takes a photograph — that is the whole of what they are asked to do.
There are three doors and one room. On site it is a single page on a phone. In the office it is this website, where the figures are checked and read. And your subcontractors have a portal of their own, where they raise the invoices they send you. Everything arrives in the same review queue.
02
Getting started
Six things, in order. Signing up is about two minutes; the rest depends on how many people you are adding.
- 1Press Sign Up. Enter your phone number and the code that arrives by text message, then your email and the code that arrives there, and last your business name.
- 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 add a test receipt from their phone, 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 up front: no card, no setup fee, and every month is billed only at its end. The fee is 0.1% of the value your team confirms, with a minimum bill of AED 1,000 a month.
03
Adding a document
Attach a photograph or a PDF and the form fills itself in from the document. You check what it read, and save it. It is the same page at a desk and on a phone.
Document image (required)
Read. Check the figures before you save.
- Supplier
- Al Maktoum Trading
- Date
- 14 Jan 2026
- Amount
- 1,250.00check this
Project
It waits in the office review queue until somebody confirms it.
- 1Open Transactions and press Add Receipt or Add Invoice. It is a web page, so there is nothing to install and nothing to keep up to date.
- 2Attach the document: a photograph of the receipt, or a PDF if that is what you were given. The reading starts the moment it is attached.
- 3It fills in what it finds — supplier, date, amount, VAT, the document number. Pick the project the cost belongs to.
- 4Check the figures against the paper, then save. The document goes into the office's review queue.
Nothing waits for the reading. Keep typing if you would rather not wait — anything you fill in yourself is kept, and the reading only fills the boxes you left alone.
Where it was not sure, it says so rather than presenting a guess as something it had checked. The field is marked check this, and a line underneath names every field it was unsure about. A marked field is not necessarily wrong; it is one nobody has looked at yet.
Adding a document does not move a number. Everything arrives as Pending and stays there until somebody with Review permission confirms it.
If something goes wrong
The photo came out blurry.
Add it anyway, and take a better one if you can. The photograph is stored with the document and the reviewer sees it beside every figure — anything Extracto could not read they type in at the desk, and anything it read wrong they type over. That is the whole reason a person confirms.
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. Add 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.
The reviewer types over any field on the review screen, beside the photograph — before confirming and after it. Every change is kept with what it said before, who changed it and when.
Some fields came back marked check this.
That is the reading telling you where it was unsure — a smudged figure, an unusual layout, a total it could not find. Look at those first, type over anything wrong, and save. A mark stops nothing.
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, your 0.1% share for the month moves with it; the bill moves only where that share is what set it, and not where the monthly minimum set 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, email help@extracto.ae.
Our totals are lower than what we have added.
Only confirmed documents are counted. Open Transactions, filter STATUS to Pending, and work through what is waiting.
05
Your subcontractors
Your subcontractors raise their invoices on Extracto themselves. They arrive typed, checked against a trade licence, and they land in the same review queue as everything else.
Al Waha Electromechanical
Licence · On file
What they may invoice against
It replaces the part of the month nobody enjoys: a PDF emailed from an accounts address, re-keyed into a spreadsheet, argued over, and paid late because nobody could find it.
- 1They set up their own account on the subcontractor portal. Their mobile number and their work email are both confirmed by a code before the account is made, and they send us their trade licence for a person here to read.
- 2They find you by the TRN printed on one of your invoices and ask to be connected. If you are not on Extracto yet they invite you by email instead, and the invitation names their firm and nothing else.
- 3You accept them from the Subcontractors tab and tick which of your projects they may bill against. Taking a firm on and opening a job to it are one form rather than two, so nobody is left looking at an empty project picker.
- 4They raise their invoices against those projects — typed, or read off the one they have already written — with the lines, the VAT and a BOQ code where they have one. Each lands under Invoices sent to you, and in Transactions as a pending document.
Extracto never holds your money. You pay your subcontractor directly and record the payment here. This is the record, not the payment rail.
There are three ways to answer one. Approve it, and it counts against the project. Reject it, with your reason. Or send it back for changes, which is the one to reach for when a figure is wrong: a rejected tax invoice keeps its number for ever and costs them a credit note to explain it. Rejecting and sending back both need a reason, and the subcontractor is sent it word for word.
Both of you see where an invoice has got to, which is the question that costs a quantity surveyor a morning a week:
The subcontractor is never billed for any of this. You are, on what your own office confirms, at the same rate as everything else — an invoice from a subcontractor costs you exactly what a supplier invoice of the same value costs you.
Questions people ask
Do we pay for our subcontractors' accounts?
No. They pay nothing, ever. Your fee is worked out on the value your own office confirms, and their invoice counts once, on the day you confirm it.
One of ours is not registered for VAT.
Then the portal cannot raise it for them yet. It issues tax invoices only, and a tax invoice needs a verified TRN — a firm under the AED 375,000 threshold has none and issues a plain invoice instead. For that work they invoice you outside Extracto for now.
What about retention?
They invoice net of it. VAT on retention is not due until the retention is received or invoiced, so it does not belong on the tax invoice — the retention is raised as its own document, with VAT, when it is released.
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 fifty, which is past anything a real bill has needed. 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.
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 — a hidden tab is skipped on purpose. Extracto reads the first fifty tabs of a workbook; anything past that is not read.
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. Only your Admin can change them, and a change takes effect the next time that person opens Extracto.
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 sees the page they add documents from and nothing else — no totals, no other projects, no dashboard.
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
Nothing up front; every month is billed at its end. 0.1% of the value of the documents you confirm, with a minimum of AED 1,000 a month. No per-user fee, nothing hidden.
Adding a document, reading it and correcting it are all free. The fee is worked out at the moment a reviewer confirms a document, on that document's own value.
- AED 500
- AED 1,000
The AED 1,000 minimum is what turns the first figure into the second.
A document you reject costs nothing. A document still waiting for review has not been billed. A month you confirm anything at all in is billed the greater of your 0.1% and AED 1,000 — so a very quiet month still meets the minimum. A month in which nothing at all is confirmed is not invoiced.
Your Admin sees each month on the Payment tab — the confirmed value, the amount actually due, and which of the two terms set it.
10
Anything else
The questions that belong to no single step.
Can we use it in Arabic?
Yes. Extracto reads Arabic documents, and every page — this guide, the dashboard and the subcontractor portal — 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 at help@extracto.ae before you close it.
That is the whole product.
Signing up takes about two minutes, and your site staff have nothing to learn.