Automate Accounting Document Sharing

Do you want to automate the document sharing process? With Gmail and Google Drive it is straightforward. Here is how.

Step 1: filter the bills arriving in Gmail

Let’s start with the receipts and bills that arrive in your Gmail account. This will automatically save all of them to your Google Drive.

1. Open your Gmail account. Go to the gear icon in the top right corner and select Settings.
2. Go to the Filters and Blocked Addresses tab and click Create a new filter.
3. Type the email address of the vendor sending the bills or receipts.
4. Type your own email address, where you receive the bills or receipts.
5. Type a subject line. This matters if you receive documents other than bills from the same vendor that you do not want saved to Drive.
6. You can also use other filters such as Has the words or Doesn’t have.
7. Select the Has attachment checkbox.
8. Click Create filter with this search.
9. On the next screen, select Apply the label and use “Work”, or any other suitable name.
10. Finally, click Create filter.

That’s it. This will label every email carrying a bill or receipt as an attachment from the specified vendor. You can create as many filters as you need, one for each vendor.

Step 2: move them to Google Drive automatically

Now go to IFTTT and sign up.

1. Click your username in the top right corner and select Create. This creates a new recipe to move your bills and receipts to Google Drive.
2. Click the underlined this.
3. Type “Gmail” in the search channels bar and click the Gmail channel.
4. Select New email in inbox labeled.
5. Type the label you used when creating the email filter. We used “Work”. Note that the label is case sensitive.
6. Click Create trigger.
7. Click the underlined that.
8. Type “Google Drive” in the action channel search bar and click the Google Drive action channel.
9. Select Upload file from URL.
10. Type the Drive folder path where you want to save the receipts or bills. Here we use “Accounting”.
11. Click Create action.
12. Click Create recipe.
13. Finally, go to Google Drive and create a folder with the same name you used. We used “Accounting”.

Done. All bills and receipts from the specified vendor will now be saved automatically to the “Accounting” folder in Google Drive.

Step 3: capture paper bills too

Now let’s see how to save bills or receipts that you receive physically, with a single tap.

1. Go to the widgets on your Android phone.
2. Select the Drive Scan widget.
3. It will ask you to select the Google Drive folder where you want to save the bills or receipts. Again, we select “Accounting”.
4. Tap once, scan the physical bill or receipt, and it will be saved to the “Accounting” folder.
5. Now share the “Accounting” folder with your accountant.

All your bills and receipts then reach your accountant for bookkeeping without any extra effort, leaving you more time to focus on your business.