Invoices on Telegram
Invoices sent on Telegram land in the right company and come out read.
You send the PDF or the photo to the iCifra bot, in private or in that client's group, and back comes a reply with the supplier, the total and the date — or the reason the document has been left waiting.
01Invoices on Telegram
What can be sent to the bot?
A PDF or a photo, up to 15 MB. What it does not accept it says, and it names the type.
The bot accepts a file with its type declared, and it accepts a photo, of which it takes the largest resolution Telegram offers. The types allowed are PDF, JPEG, PNG, WEBP, HEIC and HEIF, with a cap of 15 MB. Anything else gets a refusal that names the type you sent and the allowed set, so no file is ever left without a reply and none is lost without saying so.
Sending receipts on Telegram works the same way as sending an invoice: the photo of a supermarket receipt with several VAT rates is read with its breakdown by rate, base and VAT amount, because the model reads the whole page and not a template per supplier. A ZIP, on the other hand, is refused: archives and folders are only walked through in the browser, where the ZIP is opened before anything is uploaded.
02Invoices on Telegram
A private chat, or one group per client?
The recommended pattern is one Telegram group per client company, linked just once.
You create that client's group, add the bot and send “/link CODE” once with that company's code, which is generated in Settings. From then on everything that lands in the group is filed under that company without asking anything, and the bot saves the group's title on each invoice, so the list shows which way it came in. You can invite the client into their own group: they upload, you review.
If you would rather have a single chat that asks every time, “/unlink” unlinks it and the bot shows the company picker again after each file. One configuration detail worth knowing: the bot reads a group's files because it has privacy mode switched off in BotFather. With privacy mode on, a bot only receives the messages addressed to it, and a PDF left in a group would never arrive, with no code able to detect it.
03Invoices on Telegram
What does the bot reply when it receives a file?
First that it has received it, and then the summary or the reason. No reply is silence.
It acknowledges the file and says it is processing it. Then the summary arrives — supplier, total and date — with a note added when the document stays in review or when the recipient does not match the company. Or “possible duplicate”, saying that it has not been posted. Or the note that the file comes from an unapproved sender and is waiting in the inbox. Or a refusal from the plan, written in the chat's language.
The reading is done by AI: an Anthropic model, claude-sonnet-5, reads the PDF or the photo and returns the fields; what it does not settle stays in review until a person approves it. If the arithmetic does not balance against the printed total, the summary says so instead of correcting the figures. If the database fails, the bot replies that nothing has been lost and that you should send it again in a minute, and the real error is logged.
- Three languages
- The bot speaks Spanish, English and Russian. The choice saved in the chat always wins over the language of the Telegram client, and each of the three buttons reads in its own language.
- The commands
- “/link CODE” links the chat to a company, “/which” says which one it is linked to, “/unlink” lets it go and “/language” changes language.
- Duplicate by content
- Through the bot, a duplicate is caught by content: same supplier and same number, or same total and same date. The file's hash is only computed in the browser.
04Invoices on Telegram
Where does the file you send end up?
In the group's company, or in the inbox, waiting for somebody to say whose it is.
A chat linked to a company files straight into it. A chat linked to your account but not to a company sends back a row of buttons with your companies and a button to leave it in the inbox; the file waits there until somebody presses, and only an approved sender in that chat can press. A chat that is linked to nothing does not even get as far as downloading the file: the link is read first.
A file from a sender who is not on the chat's list is saved all the same, but it goes into quarantine and into review, and it reaches no book until the account holder approves it in the inbox. If the sender list cannot be read, it counts as “not approved”. An unverified sender has a cap of five quarantined files per chat per hour, and an unlinked chat gets three replies an hour and then goes quiet.
05Invoices on Telegram
Which plans include the bot, and at what rate does it read?
The bot comes with Despacho, Gestoría and Gestoría Plus, and the hourly rate is the plan's.
Invoices read per hour are 10 on the free plan, 10 on Solo, 100 on Despacho, 250 on Gestoría and 500 on Gestoría Plus. The limit is checked on the server before the model is called, and the window rolls. The bot does not come with the free plan or with Solo, and the door is closed by default: a plan that cannot be resolved is refused, not let through. The database checks the plan again when the link code is generated.
When the rate is reached, the bot says so in these words: “Invoice reading has reached your plan's rate of 100 an hour. Your documents are saved and will process if you retry within the hour; a higher plan reads more invoices an hour.” It prints no count because the rate is shared with the assistant and both come out of the same counter.
06Invoices on Telegram
What does the bot not do?
It does not open ZIPs, it does not post anything by itself, and it lets nobody in just for writing to it.
It does not expand archives: that happens only in the browser. It does not fill in the file's hash, so the same PDF sent twice through the bot is caught by content and not by its bytes. It does not receive email: the two doors are the browser and Telegram. It does not issue invoices and it files nothing. And it does not open the account: if the account is not approved yet, the bot says so and downloads not one byte.
Nor does it post anything on its own. A quarantined file is in review by definition, and only an approved document reaches the Libro Mayor, the figures and the quarter's sheets. A reading that fails never becomes your fault: the document is kept with its reason. And the reports screen does not show 0,00 € when it could not read the data: it refuses to show figures, because a zero there would look like nothing to declare.
07Questions
What do gestorías and practices ask before trying it?
How is the bot linked to a company?
Can my client send the invoices?
Can I send it a ZIP with the whole month?
And if I leave an invoice in the wrong group?
What happens if I send a hundred invoices at once?
Where do the files I send pass through?
One group per client, and invoices stop having to be chased.
The bot comes with Despacho, Gestoría and Gestoría Plus. You can start on the free plan to see how a document is read — one company and ten invoices a month, no card — and tell us how you collect your clients' papers today.