Invoices & receipts
How to Export Invoices and Receipts as Spreadsheets, Bills, or Expenses
Export converted invoices and receipts as CSV, Excel, or JSON, as bill imports for QuickBooks and Xero, or as confirmed paid expenses, with the columns and checks each destination needs.
Last verified in Bankflow on September 14, 2026.
What You Can Export
Invoices and receipts in Convert export separately from your bank transactions, because a receipt isn't a bank transaction and doesn't belong in a bank-feed file. From one dialog you can produce:
| Output | What it's for |
|---|---|
| CSV, Excel, JSON | Document summaries or line items, with the columns you choose, in the order you choose. |
| QuickBooks bills | A bill-import CSV with one line per item and the expense account mapped from each document's category. |
| Xero bills | The same for Xero, including tax amounts. |
| QuickBooks expenses | Paid expenses, as a CSV for Autymate's QuickBooks Expense importer. |
| Xero Spend Money | Paid expenses, as a CSV for SaasAnt's Xero Spend Money importer. |
All of these are files you download and import. None of them is a live connection to your accounting software.
Step 1: Choose What to Export
Where you start decides what's exported:
- Export at the top of the Convert page exports every document you've converted.
- Exporting from inside a folder exports that folder.
- Selecting documents on the Files tab and choosing Export exports just those. So does Export on a single document's row.
The top of the dialog confirms which documents are included.
Step 2: Choose Bills or Paid Expenses
Record purchases as sets how your accounting software should treat the whole export:
- Bills (supplier invoices): purchases you'll pay later, or want recorded as bills.
- Paid expenses: purchases that are already paid.
It applies to the whole export and doesn't change whether each document is an invoice or a receipt.
Step 3: Pick a Format and Columns
For CSV, Excel, and JSON, choose a Level:
- One row per document: forty receipts become forty rows, with the vendor, date, number, currency, category, folder, totals, and whether the arithmetic checked out.
- One row per line item: each line carries its document's date, vendor, and category, so the sheet still works as a pivot table. Line fields include description, quantity, unit, unit price, discount, tax rate, tax, and amount.
Excel always includes both, as a Documents sheet and a Lines sheet; the level decides which columns each gets. Then tick the fields you want, put them in order with the arrows beside each one, and check the live preview before you download. The footer shows how many rows and columns the file will have.
Bill and expense formats have fixed columns, because the destination's importer expects exactly those headers.
Exporting Bills
A bill export writes one bill line per item, with shipping, document-level discounts, taxes, and printed rounding adjustments accounted for, so each bill totals what the document says.
- Every document needs a category. The category becomes the expense account the bill posts to, so review your category names against your chart of accounts before importing. Categories are filled in automatically when Bankflow recognises the vendor. If a document has none, the export stops and names it.
- Xero: choose tax-exclusive amounts when you import. Each document needs its own invoice number within the file, or Xero would merge them into one bill. If two share a number, the export tells you which, so you can export them separately.
Exporting Paid Expenses
Paid expenses need a few details the documents don't contain, so the dialog asks for them:
- Payment dates. Each document's payment date starts as the day you uploaded it. Check each one against when it was actually paid.
- Payment account. The bank, card, or cash account used to pay. It applies to every purchase in the export.
- Confirmation. Tick the box confirming these purchases are fully paid and aren't already recorded as bills or expenses in your accounting software, so nothing is entered twice.
For QuickBooks expenses and Xero Spend Money, also enter the destination expense account and purchase tax code exactly as they're named in your accounting app. Each document becomes one expense for its full total, including tax, and these settings apply to every purchase in the file, so export purchases with different tax treatments separately.
These two formats are built for third-party importers: Autymate for QuickBooks and SaasAnt for Xero. You'll need an account with the importer, and the dialog links to its import instructions. If you'd rather not use one, CSV, Excel, and JSON can carry the payment details too.
Common Problems
The export says a document needs a category. Bill exports require one, and Bankflow couldn't work one out from the vendor. Leave that document out of the bill export (select the others and export those), and export it as CSV or Excel instead.
Xero combined two bills. Two documents shared an invoice number. Export them separately.
QuickBooks expense amounts include tax twice, or not at all. How QuickBooks maps tax-inclusive amounts depends on your company's regional tax settings. Review the importer's preview before you confirm.
Next Step
For your bank transactions rather than documents, see exporting transactions. To have documents converted and exported without opening Convert, set up a workflow.