Most of your purchases generate an email — Uber sends a trip receipt, Amazon sends an order confirmation, Cineplex sends a ticket confirmation. Connecting Gmail to Kinly turns those emails into tracked transactions automatically, no manual entry required. This guide covers how the integration works, what we read, and what we explicitly don’t.
The 30-second setup
- From your Kinly dashboard, go to Settings → Integrations.
- Click Connect Gmail. You’ll be redirected to Google to grant permission.
- Sign in with the Gmail account that receives your receipts (usually your main personal email).
- On the consent screen, you’ll see Kinly requesting the gmail.readonly scope. Accept.
- You’re redirected back to Settings → Integrations with a confirmation. The first poll runs within 15 minutes.
What we read
Every 15 minutes, Kinly fetches new messages from your Gmail account (the “Updates” and “Primary” categories) and classifies each one with a small AI model:
- Transaction receipt (Uber, Amazon order, restaurant bill, etc.) → parsed for merchant, amount, date, payment method; becomes a source document in your ledger, matched against your tracked transactions.
- Bill(Rogers, Toronto Hydro, Enbridge, etc.) → stored in your document vault for tax-season retrieval; no auto- merge into a transaction (we don’t auto-create a payment you didn’t actually make).
- Not financial (newsletters, friends, marketing) →discarded. The classifier sees a few hundred characters of subject + body, and if it’s not a transaction or bill, the email is dropped without being persisted in our database.
What we explicitly don’t do
- We don’t store the content of non-financial emails. The classifier sees them briefly in memory and discards them.
- We don’t train any model on your email content. Our LLM provider (Anthropic) has a contractual commitment in the standard API that customer data is not used for training.
- We don’t send your email content to advertisers or any third-party processor besides the LLM that classifies it.
- We don’t use the integration to do anything you didn’t ask for — no auto-replies, no calendar integration, no contact scraping.
Our use of Gmail data adheres to Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. See our privacy policy for the full disclosure.
Why does Gmail show a scary warning?
Google flags gmail.readonlyas a sensitive scope, so during the consent flow you’ll see a warning saying the app will be able to read your email. That’s technically correct — we can read every message — and we’ve gone through Google’s app-verification process plus a third-party security assessment (CASA tier 2) to confirm we use that capability only for the stated purpose. The warning is Google’s standard boilerplate for any app using the scope.
Disconnecting
From Settings → Integrations, click Disconnectnext to the connected Gmail account. We’ll call Google’s OAuth revoke endpoint to invalidate our refresh token, and we’ll stop polling. Past parsed transactions stay in your ledger — they’re yours.
Multiple accounts
You can connect more than one Gmail account from the same Settings page. Each is polled independently. Useful if you have a separate email for online shopping and another for personal mail.
Troubleshooting
I connected Gmail but transactions aren’t showing up. First poll can take up to 15 minutes after connect. Also check your reconciliation Inbox— many emails surface there for manual confirmation before they become transactions (because the matching engine wasn’t confident enough to auto-merge).
What if Google de-authorizes Kinly?Tokens can expire if you change your Google password or revoke our access from Google’s “Apps with access” page. The status row in Settings → Integrations shows the last sync time and any error. You can reconnect anytime by clicking Connect another with the same email.