10 Quick Ways to Gather All Invoices and Expenses for Accounting

If you're running a lean startup or small business, you've probably experienced the dreaded Sunday afternoon where you realize you need to gather months of invoices and receipts for accounting. The frustration of hunting through email threads, downloading PDFs from various payment platforms, and trying to remember which credit card you used for that AWS bill is real. The good news? There are faster, smarter ways to consolidate your financial documents without sacrificing your entire weekend.

This list covers ten practical methods to streamline invoice and expense collection, ranging from simple organizational tactics to automated solutions that can save you hours every month. Whether you're preparing for tax season, closing your books, or just trying to get a handle on your spending, these approaches will help you gather everything you need efficiently.

1. Connect Your Payment Platforms to a Central Hub

The fastest way to capture invoices and expenses is to automatically pull them from where they originate. Most businesses use multiple payment platforms—Stripe for recurring revenue, PayPal for miscellaneous vendors, credit cards for software subscriptions—and each platform holds valuable transaction data.

Instead of manually logging into each platform and exporting CSVs, connect them to a centralized financial data platform. This is the first layer of automation.

Advanced platforms like Well App act as a universal connector. Instead of just seeing a bank line item that says "Stripe," Well App digs deeper, syncing the actual transaction data and context from 20+ sources. This eliminates the need to chase down individual receipts because the transaction data flows automatically into one place.

The key benefit here is time savings. What might take 3-4 hours of manual downloading and organizing happens automatically in the background with Well App, significantly reducing errors that come from manual data entry or missed transactions.

2. Set Up Continuous Email Monitoring for Invoice Receipts

Most vendors send invoices and receipts directly to your email, but they get buried under product updates, customer inquiries, and everything else flooding your inbox. Rather than setting up basic email forwarding rules, modern financial intelligence platforms can continuously monitor your Gmail account in real-time.

Well App's Gmail integration continuously accesses your email, automatically detecting when invoices and receipts are received. The system reads incoming emails, extracts documents, and processes them immediately. When vendors share cloud links in emails, Well App resolves these links and downloads the actual documents automatically. Even receipts embedded as HTML in email bodies get converted into proper PDF format for your records.

This approach creates a comprehensive capture system that works 24/7 without any manual intervention. You're not just organizing emails—you're automatically extracting and structuring all financial data as it arrives, ensuring nothing slips through the cracks during busy periods.

3. Implement Automated Folder Structure in Cloud Storage

Manual file organization is time-consuming and error-prone. Instead of creating folders yourself, leverage integrations that automatically establish and maintain proper document architecture in your cloud storage.

Well App's Google Drive and Dropbox integrations access your cloud storage and automatically create the right folder structure for your financial documents. The system establishes consistent hierarchies for invoices, expenses, and receipts, then files documents in the appropriate locations as they're processed.

This automation ensures your documents are always organized correctly, whether they arrive via email, are captured through mobile apps, or are downloaded from vendor portals. The folder structure adapts to your business needs and maintains consistency across all document types and sources.

4. Use Mobile Receipt Capture for Physical Expenses

For physical receipts from meals, travel, or office supplies, waiting until month-end to sort through crumpled paper is a recipe for lost deductions and wasted time. Modern receipt capture goes beyond traditional scanning apps.

Well App provides a dedicated WhatsApp number where you can forward photos of physical receipts directly from your phone or mobile library. Simply take a picture of any receipt and send it via WhatsApp—the system automatically processes the image, extracts the relevant data, and files the document properly. This approach leverages the messaging app you already use daily, making receipt capture as simple as sending a photo to a contact.

The WhatsApp integration means you can capture receipts immediately after any purchase, whether you're traveling, at a business dinner, or picking up office supplies. The receipt gets digitized and categorized instantly, eliminating the risk of lost paper receipts.

5. Enable Comprehensive Bank Feed Connections

Your bank and credit card accounts already have a complete record of every transaction. Instead of manually downloading statements, connect your accounting software directly to your financial institutions through comprehensive bank feeds that cover both traditional and modern banking platforms.

Well App connects to over 11,000 banks through Plaid, enabling automatic reconciliation across banks in both the US and Europe. This is particularly valuable for EU companies doing business in the US, as the platform handles cross-border banking complexities seamlessly. The integration also covers modern financial platforms like Wise, Revolut, and Qonto that many startups rely on.

Well App goes beyond basic transaction syncing. It connects to your banks to capture transaction data, then automatically locates and matches the corresponding invoices from your email or vendor portals. You'll see every Netflix subscription, AWS bill, and Slack payment flowing in with perfect receipt matching, eliminating the manual reconciliation work that typically consumes hours each month.

6. Automate Vendor Portal Data Collection

Many regular vendors—like AWS, Microsoft, or office supply companies—store invoices in customer portals that require manual login and download. Instead of spending time each month visiting multiple vendor sites, automate this entirely.

Well App's Chrome extension transforms any website into an API, providing the capability to automate recurring invoice and receipt collection tasks. At the end of each month, the system automatically fetches invoices and receipts from all your vendor portals for bookkeeping purposes, eliminating the tedious process of manual portal visits.

This automation is particularly valuable for SaaS businesses with dozens of software subscriptions. The system can also identify forgotten subscriptions and help uncover cost optimization opportunities by providing complete visibility into all recurring vendor relationships.

7. Adopt a Unified Financial Data Platform

For growing businesses managing scattered data across emails, payment platforms, and accounting software, piecing together individual tools creates more complexity than it solves. The solution is a unified financial data platform that handles all aspects of document collection, processing, and organization automatically.

Well App serves as the single source of truth for your financial data, automatically capturing, enriching, and structuring information from all sources:

• Capture: Pulls from Gmail, vendor portals, bank feeds, cloud storage, and mobile receipts through WhatsApp

• Enrich: Categorizes transactions, matches receipts to bank records, and identifies spending patterns

• Query: AI-powered intelligence layer allows you to ask questions like "What is our burn rate this month?" in plain English

For founders wearing multiple hats, Well App functions as an automated finance team member. It handles categorization, reconciliation, and organization automatically, freeing you to focus on product development and growth.

8. Create Expense Submission Workflows for Team Members

As your team grows beyond just yourself, employee expenses become a major source of scattered financial data. Rather than collecting expense reports via Slack messages, shared spreadsheets, or random emails, implement a formal submission workflow.

Use a dedicated expense management tool or even a simple shared form where team members submit expenses with receipts attached. Set clear guidelines for what information is required: date, merchant, amount, business purpose, and receipt photo.

The key is making submission easy enough that people actually do it, but structured enough that you get consistent, complete data. Many teams use Notion databases or Airtable forms for this—free or cheap solutions that provide structure without complexity.

Build in approval workflows if needed, but keep them simple. The goal is reducing friction for both the submitter and the person who ultimately needs to record the expense in your accounting system.

9. Schedule Regular Financial Organization Sessions

Even with extensive automation, some manual review is beneficial for maintaining financial oversight. Rather than letting exceptions and edge cases accumulate, schedule a recurring 30-minute session weekly (or biweekly) to review your automated systems.

During this session, review any flagged transactions that couldn't be automatically categorized, verify that all expected invoices have been captured, and ensure everything is flowing correctly into your accounting system. This also provides regular visibility into spending patterns and business metrics.

Many founders find Friday afternoons work well for this—a time when you can handle administrative oversight without disrupting deep work on product development. The goal is maintaining control and awareness rather than doing manual data entry.

10. Use API Integrations for Programmatic Data Collection

If you have development resources and manage high volumes of transactions, consider building custom API integrations to pull invoice and expense data programmatically. Most financial platforms offer robust APIs that let you retrieve transaction data, invoice details, and expense records.

This is particularly valuable if you have unique workflows or need to transform data in specific ways before it reaches your accounting system. You could build automated scripts that pull new transactions from payment processors and push them to accounting software with proper categorization.

While this requires technical investment upfront, it provides maximum control and can handle complex scenarios that off-the-shelf tools might not support. Platforms like Well App can serve as the integration layer, allowing you to connect various financial data sources through a unified API rather than building individual connections to each vendor.