Save rece ipts to iCloud

Make receipts available on all of your devices

You can create commands that separate personal and work receipts

These days, you probably do a lot of shopping online, in part because it saves you paying the mark-up charged by many

high street stores. You can choose at your leisure without traipsing around town, then sit back and wait for your shopping to arrive.

All of your confirmations, invoices and receipts will be neatly stored in your email inbox or appear on a checkout screen in your web browser, from which you can save them for reference. If you ever need to make a claim or return an item, you’ll know exactly where to find the necessary ‘paperwork’, which is rarely the case when you’re stashing till slips into folders and envelopes.

However, it’s easy to let things slide, and tempting to leave everything floating in your inbox, or to drag out PDFs into what seems – at the time – an entirely logical folder, until you realise you can’t find it again when you need it. Moreover, not all receipts come as a PDF, or any kind of attachment at all. Some are text in the body of an email, while others are shown on a web page after you finish your purchase. What do you do then? The PDF pop-up menu in OS X’s Print dialog provides you with a way to save a PDF of a web page, an email or any other printable document to a dedicated Web Receipts folder. The trouble with this is that it gives you no control over the location of the Web Receipts folder, which is automatically placed within Documents in your user account, out of reach of your iOS devices and, typically, your other Macs, too.

iCloud Drive

You could just create a folder on iCloud Drive and save PDFs there manually, but that gets tedious. Alternatively, you could create a special shortcut, a symbolic link, to relocate OS X’s own Web Receipts folder to iCloud Drive, making its contents available on all of your Macs, in iOS 9’s iCloud Drive app (turn it on in Settings > iCloud > iCloud Drive > Show on Home Screen), and wherever you can sign in to iCloud.com. Here, though, we’re going to construct a new workflow from scratch, which