How to find all your receipts in Gmail (manual method + the easy way)

Somewhere in your Gmail account is close to every receipt you've been sent for the last decade. Order confirmations, tax invoices, subscription renewals, booking confirmations — they're all in there, buried under newsletters and calendar invites. Getting them out is a search problem, and Gmail's search is better than most people realise. Here's the full manual method first; the shortcut is at the end.

Start with Gmail's own purchases category

Gmail already classifies a lot of receipt-shaped mail for you. Type this into the search bar:

category:purchases

That's Google's own machine-learned bucket for order confirmations and receipts, and for many people it surfaces 70–80% of everything in one shot. It's not exposed as a tab in the inbox, but it works as a search operator. Scroll through what it finds before doing anything fancier — you'll get a feel for what it missed.

The search operators that catch the rest

The purchases category misses plenty: smaller retailers, invoices from tradespeople, anything sent from an unusual address. These searches sweep the gaps:

subject:(receipt OR invoice OR "order confirmation" OR "your order" OR "payment confirmation")

Subject lines are the most reliable signal — nearly every automated receipt says what it is in the subject. Add sender patterns to catch the ones that don't:

from:(noreply OR no-reply OR receipts OR billing OR orders)

And for attached PDF invoices (utilities, insurers, and accountants love these):

has:attachment filename:pdf (receipt OR invoice OR "tax invoice")

You can combine any of these with date ranges to work through one financial year at a time, which is exactly what you want at tax time:

subject:(receipt OR invoice) after:2025/07/01 before:2026/07/01

Collect them with a label and a filter

Searching is a one-off; a label makes it repeatable. Run your best search, then click Show search options (the sliders icon in the search bar) → Create filter → tick Apply the label and create a label called Receipts. Tick Also apply filter to matching conversations and Gmail retro-labels everything the search found.

From then on, every new email matching the filter gets the label automatically. One click on the label in the sidebar shows your whole receipt archive, newest first. This costs nothing and works forever — a perfectly fine system if your needs stop at "be able to find them".

Where the manual method runs out

Three things eventually push people past the label-and-filter approach:

• It finds emails, not data. A label gives you 400 emails, not a spendable-by-category total. Tax time still means opening them one at a time and typing numbers into a spreadsheet.
• The filter is always slightly wrong. Too narrow and it misses the receipt from the vendor who writes "Thanks for your purchase!" in the subject; too broad and it catches every newsletter containing the word "order". You'll tune it forever.
• Old receipts quietly rot. Most receipt emails load their images — sometimes the entire itemised receipt — from the retailer's servers, and those images go dark after a year or two. The email is still in Gmail; the content isn't. We wrote up the mechanics in why email receipts break over time.

The easy way

The Paper Keep does the same sweep with a read-only Gmail connection: it searches your inbox for receipt-shaped mail, shows you an estimate of what it found, and lets you import the last 30 days, 90 days, or a full 12 months. Each receipt is parsed — vendor, date, total, GST, line items — categorised, made searchable, and stored with its images archived so it still renders in five years.

The connection is OAuth and read-only: it can't send mail, can't delete anything, and you can revoke it from your Google account at any time. Setup is a couple of minutes — the walkthrough is in the Gmail docs.

And if you'd rather not connect your inbox at all, the label-and-filter method above pairs nicely with auto-forwarding matching mail instead — same filter, different action.

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