Invoices from email → one payment table

By the Mail → Excel team · Updated 2026-10-18

If invoices arrive by email, the bottleneck is not reading them but collecting them into one list. Here is a workflow that does it in one pass.

The workflow

1. Collect — a script scans the mailbox for messages with attachments and saves PDFs to a folder.
2. Filter — keep files whose name or subject matches invoice patterns (invoice, receipt, счёт).
3. Extract — pull the amount, date and vendor from the PDF text.
4. Reconcile — write everything into one Excel sheet and match against bank payments.

Step 1–2: collect only invoice emails

status, data = imap.search(None, '(SINCE 01-Sep-2026 SUBJECT "invoice")')
# for Outlook / Yandex also try: SUBJECT "receipt", SUBJECT "счёт"

Server-side search is much faster than downloading every message and filtering locally.

Step 3: amount extraction

PDFs are not text files — use pdfplumber or pypdf to get text, then a strict regex:

import re
amount = re.search(r"(?:total|amount due|итого)[^0-9]{0,20}([0-9][0-9 .,]*)", text, re.I)

What to put in the table

Why not a full accounting system

Accounting suites assume invoices are already in a structured feed. If suppliers send PDFs to a mailbox, a small script bridges the gap in an afternoon — and keeps working every month.

Need the collector without writing code? The $3 script saves attachments and writes the email table; the PDF amount step is usually a 20-line addition.