How to Use Documents: Invoices, Receipts, and the Paperwork Behind Your Bank Rows

What Documents Does

Documents reads the paperwork that sits behind your bank statements. It handles eight kinds:

• Invoices / bills and receipts: the vendor, date, number, currency, every line item with its quantity and price, taxes, shipping, discounts, and the totals.
• Loan statements and repayment schedules: each instalment, split into principal and interest.
• Payout reports from Stripe, PayPal, Shopify, or Square: the sales, refunds, fees, and chargebacks a payout was made of.
• Payroll registers and payroll journals from any provider: each pay run's gross wages, taxes withheld, deductions, employer taxes and contributions, net pay and the provider's fee.
• Payslips: gross pay and each deduction, down to the net pay.
• Brokerage ledgers, the cash side of a brokerage account: money added and withdrawn, dividends, interest, charges, and tax deducted.
• Tax forms such as a W-2, a 1099, or a P60, kept for reference with their totals read out.

Two more kinds work with invoices: credit notes, which take an amount off what you owe a supplier, and supplier statements, which Bankflow checks against that supplier's invoices to show what's missing.

Then it checks the arithmetic the document prints, so you can see at a glance whether the figures add up.

A document never becomes a transaction. Instead, you link it to the bank payment it explains, and a book's reports use it to show what that payment was made of. How each kind changes the report is in loans, payouts, payroll, and payslips. You can also export invoices and receipts as a spreadsheet or as bills and expenses for your accounting software.

Step 1: Add Documents

Open Documents in the sidebar and click Add documents, which opens Add files with Documents chosen. Or click Add files anywhere and let Bankflow sort them: invoices and receipts can go in with bank statements, and each lands where it belongs. Pick what you have:

• Invoice, receipt, loan statement, payroll register, payslip or tax form: PDFs and photos (PNG, JPG, WEBP, or HEIC). Bankflow works out which kind each one is.
• On a phone: tap the camera at the top of any page to open Capture and photograph a receipt or invoice. See installing the app and capturing receipts.
• Payout report, payroll journal or brokerage ledger: the CSV or Excel export from Stripe, PayPal, Shopify, or Square, a payroll register or journal from Gusto, ADP or another provider, or a brokerage funds ledger. A PDF broker ledger works too. A payroll export is recognised by its columns and read as a payroll register, not as a payout.

For PDFs and photos, the arrow beside the button, or More options in Add files, says how the files are grouped. More options also files them into a folder:

• Separate documents: each file is its own document. This is the default.
• One document, several pages: the files are pages of one document, in the order you picked them. Use this for a long invoice you photographed a page at a time.

On a phone, the add button also offers Take a photo, which opens your camera so the photo becomes one document. To file documents straight into a folder, open the folder and add them from there.

Each document is read in the background and appears as soon as it's done. A payout export becomes one document per payout.

Step 2: Review a Document

Click any document to open it. It opens over the page you are on, so closing it leaves you where you were, and it looks the same wherever you open it from: Documents, the Transactions ledger, a report, Tasks or a link. The lines Bankflow read are on the left, and the original is on the right, where you can zoom, drag the page, and step from line to line with the arrows. A photo is shown as itself; a CSV or Excel export shows as a table instead. On a phone, View document switches to the original and Back to rows returns to the lines.

The top of the document says what it is: who sent it, its number, a pill for whether its arithmetic closes (Adds up, Needs a look, or Couldn't check), how many lines still need a look, and its type and currency. Under it are the figures it ends on, such as the subtotal, tax and total of an invoice.

Find where a value came from

Click a line and the original moves to where it was read, with it highlighted; click a highlight on the page to select its line. Click the label of a figure under the header, such as Total or Tax, to find that figure the same way. This works on photos as well as PDFs.

Check the arithmetic

The Checks chip at the top lists each sum the document implies and whether it holds: that the lines add up to the subtotal, that subtotal plus tax equals the total, that paid plus due equals the total, that each line's quantity times price equals its amount, and that the tax rate is consistent. The other kinds are checked the same way against what they print: a payslip's lines against its net pay, each pay run in a payroll register against its net pay, a loan's instalments and a ledger's rows against their running balance, a tax form's tax lines against the tax credited. Only the checks that apply to a kind are listed. A tick means it adds up; a warning means it doesn't; a dash means the document didn't print enough to check.

Arithmetic that closes is strong evidence the document was read correctly, though not a guarantee.

What the file records about itself

For PDFs, the File chip shows what the file says about its own history, such as which software produced it and whether it was changed long after it was created. These are signals, not a verdict: they can't tell you whether a document is genuine, and a document whose totals add up is usually right whatever its metadata says. Photos have no file history, so nothing is shown for them.

Step 3: Review Its Lines

Each line is Approved, Needs a look, or Excluded, as a statement's rows are. A line Bankflow flagged, such as one whose figures don't multiply out, starts as Needs a look and says why when you click it; every other line starts as approved. The chips above the lines show All, Needs a look, Approved, Excluded and Edited, each with its count, and you can search the lines or order them as printed, with the ones needing a look first, or by the largest amount.

• Approve a line once you have compared it with the original. Approve all at the bottom approves every line that needs a look.
• Exclude a line that shouldn't count, such as one read twice. It stays on the document, struck through, and is left out of everything else: its totals and checks, exports, matching, reports and payroll. When the lines no longer add up only because you excluded one, the check says so instead of failing. Put back brings it back.
• Mark for a look flags a line for you or a colleague to come back to.
• Select several lines with their checkboxes (Shift+click selects a range) to approve, exclude or mark them together.

When no line needs a look, Mark reviewed records that the document has been checked, and by whom. The document shows Reviewed in its header and in the Documents list. Changing any line afterwards takes the mark away, since it no longer describes what was checked. A document with lines needing a look is offered on Tasks.

Every change can be undone from the message that confirms it. If someone else changed the same document while you had it open, Bankflow reads it again and asks you to check before trying once more.

Step 4: Correct What Was Misread

Click a line, then Edit, to correct any of its fields: its description, date and kind as well as its quantity, price and amount. A changed figure asks for a reason, which is kept with the line. Add line adds one the reading missed, and Delete removes one it made up, such as a subtotal read as a line. Click a figure under the header to correct a total, and Edit at the top to correct who sent it, its number and its dates. Every correction re-checks the whole document, and when the figures finally add up, Bankflow tells you so. Clearing a figure means the document doesn't print it; it isn't treated as zero.

A document of more than one page has Pages at the top: pick a page to exclude every line read from it, such as a cover sheet or a page printed twice, or keep only the pages you pick.

If a document was read as the wrong kind, change it with the type picker at the top: Invoice / bill, Receipt, Loan statement, Payout, Payslip, Payroll register, Brokerage ledger, or Tax form.

If no currency was read, the currency on the document's row shows Set. Click it, or use Set currency in the row menu, and choose the currency printed on the document. Change currency corrects one that was read wrongly.

Step 5: Link a Document to Its Payment

The Payment column on the Files tab pairs each document with the bank row it explains. A suggestion needs the same amount and a payment near the date it was due, and the vendor's name helps. Depending on the kind, the button reads Link payment, Link deposit (a payout), or Link salary (a payslip). One click links it; a linked row says when it was Paid, Deposited, or Credited, and clicking it opens the payment in its statement.

• No suggestion? Use Find payment… in the row menu to search your transactions by hand.
• A loan statement links instalment by instalment, and a brokerage ledger transfer by transfer: the cell offers to link every suggested payment or transfer at once.
• A tax form is kept For reference. No bank payment settles it, so it is never suggested or linked.
• Unlink payment in the row menu undoes a link.

For a month-end pass, Match at the top of the page shows every suggestion at once, with a count of how many are waiting. Links are only ever suggested; nothing is linked until you confirm it.

Linking moves nothing: the transaction keeps its category and its place in your ledger. What changes is the report, which can now show what the payment was made of.

Catch Duplicates

Clients send the same bill twice: forwarded by email and uploaded, or photographed and then sent as a PDF. Documents marks a possible copy with an icon beside its file name, saying which earlier document it looks like. It is a copy when one of its pages is the same file, when it has the same vendor and document number (written any way, so INV-001 and inv 001 match), or, when neither has a number, the same vendor, day, total, and currency. When there are any, a possible duplicates button above the list shows only those. Delete the copies you don't need; one sent to your accounting software is skipped if what it copies is already there.

Organise with Folders

The Documents page has three tabs:

• Files: every document. Search by file name, vendor, number, or folder; filter by kind (invoices, receipts, loan statements, payouts, payroll registers, payslips, brokerage ledgers, or tax forms); and sort.
• Folders: your folders, each with its document count, when it last changed, and its total. A folder holding more than one currency shows Mixed rather than adding different currencies together. Documents you haven't filed are under Ungrouped documents.
• Activity: every conversion, with when it was uploaded, how long it took, and what it cost.

Click Add folder to create one with a name, icon, and colour. Click a folder to open it, add documents to it, or rename it. Deleting a folder doesn't delete its documents; they become ungrouped.

On the Files tab, select documents (Shift+click selects a range) to move them to a folder, export them, download their originals, or delete them. Downloaded originals are renamed by date, vendor, and total (for example 2026-08-14_Blue-Bottle-Coffee_12.50.jpg), so you don't end up with a folder of files called IMG_4821. Several download together as one ZIP. Deleting a document asks you to confirm and removes its stored file too.

Send Them to Your Accounting Software

Select invoices and receipts and choose Send to QuickBooks, Xero, Zoho Books, or Sage. Supplier invoices become bills and receipts become expenses, each with the original file attached, and a document is never sent to the same company twice by accident. See sending to accounting.

Categories

Bankflow files a category against a document when it recognises the vendor: from the category you gave an earlier document from the same vendor, or the category your transactions use for that merchant. The category matters when you export bills, where it becomes the expense account each bill posts to.

What It Costs

Reading a PDF or photo uses one credit per page, the same as a statement. Payout and brokerage exports in CSV or Excel are read without AI and use no credits. You aren't charged when:

• the conversion fails,
• the file turns out not to be a document Bankflow reads at all, or
• it's a bank statement, in which case Documents tells you to import it on the Statements page instead.

If you run out of credits, the conversion pauses rather than failing. Top up, then use Retry on it in Files; the file you uploaded is still there. See credits and billing.

Other Ways In

A workflow can pick up documents from a watched Dropbox or OneDrive folder, or from photos you email to your import address, and convert them without you opening Documents at all.

A client can send you their invoices and receipts through an upload link, without an account. Each file waits in the Inbox of Requests until you choose Add as a document, so nothing is read or charged for until you say so.

Next Step

See what each kind does to your reports in loans, payouts, and payslips, and read the result in a book. To take invoices and receipts into your accounting software, export them as a spreadsheet, as QuickBooks or Xero bills, or as paid expenses.