How can I automise receipt retrieval from the Google Ads Campaign transaction Billing?
I have an issue where every three to four days I have to log in to my Google Ads account in order to retrieve the invoice or receipt for the campaigns I’m running. This feels extremely inefficient, especially since I use Pleo which has allowed me to automate the large majority of my receipt retrieval and cost tracking. Thus, is it possible to integrate Pleo into Google Ads? Otherwise am I able to get GoogleAds to send an email to me with the invoice/receipt of the transaction(s) instead of requiring me to manually retrieve it every other day?
The short answer is:
Manually retrieving invoices every few days is completely inefficient, and unfortunately, Google Ads does not have a built-in feature to automatically email receipts or invoices for accounts on automatic payments.
The most robust and automatable solution is to leverage the Google Ads API’s InvoiceService, which can programmatically retrieve the PDF invoice documents.
To integrate this with a modern expense management platform like Pleo, you would need to build a server-side solution using a system like Google Tag Manager Server Container and a service like Stape or Google Cloud Platform to fetch the invoices via the API and then either directly upload them to Pleo’s API or send them to Pleo’s dedicated invoice-forwarding email address.
The long answer is:
Your issue is incredibly common for businesses using automated expense platforms like Pleo, and it stems from the fact that while Google Ads provides invoices and receipts, it generally requires a manual login and download for advertisers on the standard automatic payments setting.
For accounts eligible for and set up on monthly invoicing – usually larger corporate accounts with a credit line – the invoices are typically emailed to the billing contacts, but this is a specific, high-volume payment setting that doesn’t apply to most advertisers.
Therefore, to achieve the level of automation you have with Pleo for other expenses, you must move to a programmatic solution.
This is where the Google Ads API comes in.
Specifically, the API includes an InvoiceService that allows a developer to query for monthly invoices and their corresponding PDF download links, assuming your account is set up for monthly invoicing, which is the most reliable method.
If you are on automatic payments, you would still use the API to access billing data, but the transaction receipts are less structured than a monthly invoice.
An excellent and surprisingly cheap solution is to create a server-side integration that acts as the intermediary.
This is where you would use a lightweight server, such as one provisioned cheaply via Stape or hosted on Google Cloud Platform, to run the logic.
This server would periodically call the Google Ads API to check for new invoices.
Once a new invoice is found, the server would download the PDF document.
From there, the server can complete the automation by either using Pleo’s API/webhooks to directly upload the document to your Pleo account, or by simply attaching the PDF to an email and sending it to your company’s dedicated Pleo invoice email address for automatic processing.
This entire pipeline – Google Ads API -> Server (GTM Server Container/Stape) -> Pleo’s API/Email – removes the manual login process completely and provides a hands-free, reliable retrieval method that seamlessly fits into your existing automated finance workflow.
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