How to get your receipts ready for your accountant

Most people start preparing for their accountant about a week before they need to. That week tends to involve a shoebox, a kitchen table, and a growing sense of dread. Paper receipts get stacked next to faded thermal prints. Bank statements pile up. Email confirmations from eleven months ago sit buried under thousands of other messages. And somewhere in the middle of it all, the question surfaces: did I keep the one for the new laptop?

The problem is rarely that you spent money you should not have. The problem is that the evidence of what you spent is scattered across too many places, in too many formats, with no clear way to pull it together. Your accountant needs a clean, categorised record. You have a mess.

This is what Fabric is built to help with. Not just storing receipts, but keeping them organised throughout the year so that when tax time arrives, the work is mostly done. You capture receipts as they come in, tag and sort them by category, and when you are ready, share a single link with your accountant that gives them everything they need.

Capture receipts as they arrive

The most important habit is also the simplest: save receipts the moment you get them. Fabric's quick capture lets you photograph a paper receipt, snap a screenshot of a digital one, or drag and drop a PDF into your workspace without breaking your stride. If you are handed a handwritten invoice at a market or from a tradesperson, the handwriting scanner will read and store the text so it becomes searchable later.

For receipts that arrive by email, and most do now, Fabric's Gmail connection can pull in bills, invoices, and order confirmations automatically. Rather than forwarding each one manually, you set it up once and let the receipts flow in alongside everything else. This is particularly useful for recurring subscriptions and utility bills that are easy to forget about until someone asks for them.

The goal here is to remove the gap between receiving a receipt and storing it. Every receipt that ends up in Fabric is one fewer receipt you need to hunt for later.

Organise by tax category, not by date

Most people who do keep receipts tend to sort them by date. That makes intuitive sense but creates extra work at tax time, because your accountant does not care when you bought printer ink. They care that it was an office supply.

Fabric's folders and tags let you sort receipts by the categories your accountant will use: office supplies, travel, meals and entertainment, software subscriptions, professional development, insurance, and so on. You can create a top-level folder for the tax year and nest category folders inside it. Each receipt gets tagged when you capture it, and if you forget to tag something, you can always find it later using semantic search, which understands what a document is about rather than relying on exact file names.

This kind of structure means your accountant receives receipts grouped by category, not as a single chronological dump they need to sort through themselves. It saves them time, which often saves you money.

Let AI do the summarising

Once your receipts are collected and categorised, Fabric's AI assistant can generate expense summaries across your folders. Ask it to total up your travel expenses for the year, or to list every software subscription you paid for, and it will pull the relevant figures from the receipts you have stored. These summaries sit alongside your receipts as reference documents, giving your accountant both the raw records and a clear overview.

Fabric's self-writing docs take this a step further. Rather than manually creating a spreadsheet of expenses, you can have Fabric generate an expense report that draws from the receipts in a given folder. The report updates as you add more receipts, so by the end of the tax year, you have a living document that reflects your spending without any manual data entry.

This is not about replacing your accountant's judgement. It is about giving them cleaner inputs so they can focus on the decisions that require expertise rather than spending billable hours deciphering your records.

Connect receipts to invoices

If you are a freelancer or run a small business, your accountant may need to see how receipts relate to the invoices you have sent or received. Fabric's memory engine creates connections between related documents. When you store both a supplier invoice and the receipt for payment, the memory engine links them so your accountant can trace the relationship without asking you to explain it.

This kind of contextual linking is difficult to achieve with a traditional file system. Folders can hold documents, but they cannot express that this receipt is the payment for that invoice, or that these three expense receipts relate to the same client project. The memory engine handles those relationships quietly in the background, and they become visible when your accountant reviews the material.

Share with your accountant securely

When everything is ready, you do not need to zip up files, burn a USB drive, or send a dozen email attachments. Fabric lets you publish a space as a shareable link. You choose which folders or spaces to include, and your accountant gets a clean, browsable view of your receipts, summaries, and reports.

If you prefer more control, you can use collaboration to give your accountant viewer access to specific folders. They see what you want them to see, nothing more. For sensitive documents, you can add password protection to shared links, ensuring that only your accountant can open them.

Fabric's link analytics let you see when your accountant opens the shared files. This is useful for knowing whether they have started reviewing your documents without needing to send a follow-up email asking if they received everything.

Keep it secure

Financial documents deserve proper protection. Fabric uses AES-256 encryption and holds CASA Tier 2 certification, which means your receipts, invoices, and summaries are stored with the same level of security you would expect from a financial institution. Your cloud drive holds everything without storage limits, so you never need to decide which receipts are worth keeping and which to delete. Keep them all. Storage is not the constraint; organisation is.

Build the habit through the year

The real trick to getting your receipts ready for your accountant is not doing it all at once. It is doing a little throughout the year. Capture each receipt when you get it. Tag it. Drop it in the right folder. By the time your accountant asks for your records, you open Fabric, review what you have, generate a summary, and share a link. The whole process takes minutes rather than days.

For more detail on building a year-round receipt habit, see our guide on how to keep receipts for tax time. If you are a freelancer managing both incoming and outgoing paperwork, how to organise invoices as a freelancer covers the invoice side of the equation.

Frequently asked questions

What format should receipts be in when I share them with my accountant?

Most accountants are comfortable with PDFs, photographs, and screenshots. Fabric stores all of these and makes them viewable through a shared link without requiring your accountant to download anything. If your accountant prefers a particular format, you can export documents from Fabric before sharing.

Can my accountant edit the documents I share?

Only if you give them edit access. Published links and viewer-level collaboration are read-only by default. Your accountant can view and download receipts but cannot modify, delete, or reorganise them.

How do I handle receipts in different currencies?

Store them as they are. Fabric's AI assistant can help you identify receipts in different currencies when generating summaries, and your accountant will apply the appropriate exchange rates. The important thing is that the original receipt is preserved.

What if I have receipts from previous tax years mixed in?

Use Fabric's search to find receipts by date, vendor, or amount, then move them into the correct year's folder. Semantic search is helpful here because you can describe what you are looking for rather than remembering exact file names.

Can I share different folders with different people?

Yes. You might share your business expense folder with your accountant and a project-specific folder with a client. Each published link or collaboration invitation is scoped to the folders you choose.

Is it safe to store financial documents in Fabric?

Fabric uses AES-256 encryption and is CASA Tier 2 certified. Your documents are encrypted both in transit and at rest. Password-protected links add another layer of control over who can access shared material.

How does the AI summary know which receipts to include?

The AI assistant works within the folders you point it to. If you ask it to summarise expenses in your "Travel" folder, it reads the receipts stored there and generates a total with line items. It does not access documents outside the scope you define.

Can I connect Fabric to my accounting software?

Fabric is designed to prepare and share your financial documents rather than replace dedicated accounting tools. You can export summaries and reports to share with your accountant, who can then import the relevant figures into their software.

What happens to shared links after tax season?

Shared links remain active until you revoke them. You can disable a published link at any time, or remove your accountant's collaboration access once they have finished reviewing your documents.

How do I find a specific receipt I know I saved but cannot locate?

Fabric's semantic search lets you describe what you are looking for in plain language. Searching for "laptop purchase July" or "train tickets to Manchester" will surface relevant receipts even if the file names do not contain those exact words. For more on this, see how to find a receipt when you need it for expenses.

Related pages

• How to keep receipts for tax time

• How to organise invoices as a freelancer

• How to find a receipt when you need it for expenses

• How to save email bills and receipts automatically