How to automatically forward receipts to one place using Gmail filters

Gmail can forward mail matching a rule to any address you've verified — another Gmail account, a shared family address, or a receipt service. Set it up once and every receipt that arrives from then on lands in one place without you touching it. This guide works even if you never sign up for The Paper Keep; the destination address is up to you.

Step 1: Add and verify the forwarding address

1. In Gmail, open Settings (gear icon) → See all settings → Forwarding and POP/IMAP.
2. Click Add a forwarding address and enter the destination — say, a [email protected] account you created for the purpose, or your personal ingest address if you use a receipt service.
3. Gmail emails a verification code to that address. Open the destination mailbox, grab the code (or click the link), and confirm it back in Gmail.

This verification step is the one everyone forgets. Until the address is verified, the Forward it to option in filters won't offer it.

Don't turn on the page's "Forward a copy of incoming mail" toggle — that forwards everything. You want forwarding driven by a filter, which is the next step.

Step 2: Build the filter

1. Click the sliders icon at the right of the Gmail search bar (Show search options).
2. In the Subject field, paste: receipt OR invoice OR "order confirmation" OR "order received" OR "your order" OR "payment confirmation"
3. Click Create filter (not Search).
4. Tick Forward it to and pick the address you verified in step 1.
5. Optionally also tick Apply the label with a Receipts label, so you keep a local collection too.
6. Click Create filter.

That's the whole mechanism. Every future email whose subject matches gets forwarded within seconds of arriving. The original stays in your inbox untouched.

Step 3: Tune it for a week

No subject-line filter is perfect on day one. Two adjustments cover most gaps:

• It misses a vendor. Some retailers write subjects like "Thanks for shopping with us!". Edit the filter (Settings → Filters and Blocked Addresses) and add a from: condition for that sender, or create a second small filter just for them.
• It over-forwards. The word "invoice" appears in a surprising amount of marketing. If newsletters start leaking through, tighten the subject terms or add -unsubscribe style negative conditions. A little leakage is normally fine — the destination just ignores non-receipts.

Multiple inboxes, one destination

The pattern scales sideways: set up the same filter in each Gmail account you use (and the equivalent rule in Yahoo, iCloud or Fastmail — see the per-provider instructions), all pointing at the same destination. That's the entire trick behind keeping a household's receipts in one place, and it's most of what people actually need.

The pre-built version

If the destination is The Paper Keep, you can skip composing the filter by hand: every account has a personal forwarding address ([email protected]), and the in-app setup guide generates a Gmail filter file with the subject patterns above and your address already filled in. You import it on Gmail's Filters and Blocked Addresses page and you're done — details in the forwarding docs.

Forwarded receipts get parsed on arrival — vendor, total, date, GST, line items — instead of piling up as unread emails. And if you'd rather not maintain filters at all, a read-only Gmail connection finds receipts without any forwarding rules.

This works even better inside The Paper Keep — start a 14-day free trial.