Receipts & documents

Every expense in your books is a claim, and the receipt is the proof. Arvello keeps the document with the transaction it belongs to, so when your accountant — or EMTA, the Estonian Tax and Customs Board — asks about a purchase from two years ago, the answer is attached to it.

Attaching a receipt to an expense

Open the expense and drag the file onto the Receipts area, or click it to browse. JPG, PNG, HEIC and PDF files are accepted, so a phone photo of a paper receipt works as well as a supplier's PDF. You can attach more than one document to the same expense — useful when an order confirmation and the actual invoice arrive separately.

Each attachment gets a preview, and a Remove button if you picked the wrong file. Attaching documents works on drafts and finalised expenses alike, so a missing receipt never blocks your bookkeeping — record the expense first, add the paperwork when you find it.

Spotting what's missing

Arvello keeps score of the paperwork for you in three places:

• The expenses list — filter by Has Receipt or No Receipt to see exactly which records still need a document.
• The expenses dashboard — an Awaiting Receipts count tracks how many expenses are recorded but undocumented.
• The Banking page — a Missing Receipts card counts this month's matched bank payments that were categorised with a deductible VAT code but have no receipt. Review & Upload opens those payments on All Transactions; forward each receipt to your receipt address (see Forwarding receipts by email), and once Arvello matches it to the payment, the payment leaves the list.

The VAT is the point: input VAT you reclaim on the KMD return needs a document behind it, and purchase documents need keeping for seven years. An expense without a receipt is a deduction you may struggle to defend. Only a recorded expense reclaims VAT, though: a bank payment categorised straight to an expense account books none, whatever its VAT code — that's the VAT the Missing Receipts card shows. To reclaim it, use Undo Categorise on the payment in All Transactions and record the purchase as an expense with its receipt.

Documents that arrive on their own

Three routes bring the paperwork in without any uploading:

• Received e-invoices — suppliers on the Peppol network deliver invoices straight into Arvello as draft expenses, document included. See E-invoices & Peppol.
• Bank reconciliation — an unexplained outgoing payment can be recorded as a new expense on the spot, and the receipt attached while you're there. See Reconciling transactions.
• Forwarded receipt emails — forward an email with the receipt to your company's own receipt address, described below.

Forwarding receipts by email

Every company has its own receipt address. You'll find it on Sales → Receipts, in the Forward receipts by email card — press Copy address and save it as a contact in your mail app. Then, whenever a receipt lands in your inbox, forward it there (or set it as the billing email with suppliers that only ever send receipts).

What happens to a forwarded email:

• Attachments are saved. PDF and image attachments are stored as receipts. If the email has no attachment but links to a hosted receipt — a Stripe receipt, for example — Arvello downloads the receipt from the link instead.
• A file Arvello already has is skipped. Each file is stored once, so a receipt you already uploaded on the Receipts page isn't stored or matched again when you forward it. Uploaded receipts aren't matched to bank payments — to attach one to a payment, delete the upload and forward the email instead.
• Arvello looks for the matching payment. It reads the amount, date and merchant from the email and searches your bank transactions for the outgoing payment. A clear match is linked automatically, and if that payment is already reconciled, the receipt is linked to the purchase invoice it paid too.
• Anything unclear waits for you. A receipt with no clear match shows as Needs review, with a badge next to Receipts in the sidebar and a notification. Open it and use Link to invoice to attach it yourself, or Dismiss it if it isn't a business receipt. If an email contained no receipt at all, you get a notification saying so.

Forwarded receipts are listed with the source Forwarded email, next to the ones you upload on the same page with Upload receipt.

Common questions

My file won't upload

Check the format — JPG, PNG, HEIC and PDF files can be uploaded. Word documents and other file types can't; export or print them to PDF first. If the receipt came by email, you don't need to save it as a file: forward the email to your receipt address instead (see Forwarding receipts by email).

I attached the wrong file

Open the expense, remove the attachment with the Remove button next to its preview, and upload the right one. Nothing else about the expense changes.