Do I need a separate email address for invoices?

No law requires one, but it is the simplest way to stop invoices from getting lost in personal inboxes. A role address such as invoices@ keeps every bill in one place, lets a colleague cover holidays and survives staff changes. German businesses, which have had to be able to receive e-invoices since 2025, can use it as their e-invoice intake, because an email inbox is enough for that.

Should I use a shared mailbox, a group or an alias for invoices?

Usually a shared mailbox in Microsoft 365 or a separate mailbox at your email provider, because every invoice sits in one place and several people can reach it. A group suits small teams, but plain distribution lists scatter copies across several inboxes. An alias lands in one person’s inbox and only works if you run the business alone.

What happens to invoices still sent to old addresses?

Don’t shut the old address down right away: forward it to the invoice address for a while or add it there as an alias. Switch each vendor as soon as their next invoice turns up. After a few months, comparing your bank statement with the invoice inbox shows who is still using an old address.

What should the invoice email address be called?

invoices@ is the clearest option in English, and ap@ or accounts-payable@ work as well. Avoid personal names and catch-all addresses like info@, where invoices get lost among enquiries and spam. If you buy from German suppliers, add rechnung@ as a second address on the same mailbox.

How do I get vendors to send invoices to the new address?

Change the billing contact in every vendor account and confirm the address if the vendor sends a verification link. Vendors without a portal get a short email with your customer number and the new address. Keep a list and only tick a vendor off once the first invoice has actually arrived at the new address.

A vendor emailed us new bank details. What should we do?

Don’t change anything based on the email alone, even if the sender address looks right. Call the vendor on a number you already had and let a second person approve the change in your vendor records. That way a fraudulent request is caught before money goes to someone else’s account.

How long do invoices and invoice emails have to be kept in Germany?

Invoices are accounting vouchers and are kept for eight years from the end of the year in which they were issued (Section 147 AO, Section 14b UStG). Emails that concern a business transaction count as business letters and are kept for six years. For e-invoices, at least the XML file must be preserved unaltered.

How to Set Up a Dedicated Email Address for Invoices

Create a role address such as invoices@yourcompany.com that doesn’t belong to any one person, and deliver it to a mailbox several people can open: a shared mailbox in Microsoft 365, a collaborative inbox or dedicated account in Google Workspace, or a real mailbox at your web host. Then move your vendors over and connect the mailbox to your bookkeeping. An alias into someone’s personal inbox is the fallback, not the goal.

Why invoices need their own address

Most invoices arrive by email — at whatever address someone typed in when the account was opened. The phone contract bills the managing director; the design tool bills a freelancer who left last year. You find out at year end, when your accountant sends a list of payments without receipts and nobody knows which inbox to search.

A dedicated address fixes four things:

One intake channel: everything you’re billed for lands in one place.
Holiday and sick cover: several people can read a role address, so invoices don’t sit unread while someone is away.
Clean handovers: when someone leaves, invoices keep arriving at the same address.
Automation: an address that only receives invoices is easy to connect to rules, accounting software or a receipt agent.

For businesses in Germany there is a legal angle too: since 1 January 2025 every German business, including Kleinunternehmer (small businesses that don’t charge VAT), must be able to receive e-invoices such as XRechnung or ZUGFeRD. According to the Federal Ministry of Finance FAQ (German), an email inbox is enough for that — so your invoice address becomes your e-invoice intake. More on the receiving side in E-Rechnung empfangen (German).

Alias, group or shared mailbox: the options compared

There are four ways to set it up. What matters is where the emails end up.

Option	Cost	Who can access it	Traceability	Best for
Alias or forwarder (Google Workspace alias, forwarder at a web host)	none (up to 30 free aliases per user in Google Workspace)	the one person whose inbox receives it	weak — mixed with personal mail	solo founders
Group or distribution list (Google group, Microsoft 365 group or distribution group)	included in your plan	all members; a Google group can run as a collaborative inbox	medium — plain lists scatter copies across inboxes	small teams sharing the work
Shared mailbox (Microsoft 365)	no license needed up to 50 GB	up to 25 people inside your organization	strong — one mailbox, one record	anyone on Microsoft 365
Separate mailbox (IMAP mailbox at a web host, or a dedicated Google Workspace user)	depends on the plan; a Workspace user needs its own license	whoever has the password	strong, as long as the password isn’t passed around	companies without Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365: a shared mailbox needs no license of its own up to 50 GB, but everyone who opens it needs a licensed Exchange Online mailbox. Microsoft recommends blocking direct sign-in to it.

Google Workspace: a group owner turns on the Collaborative Inbox under Group settings → Enable additional Google Groups features (conversation history must be on). For vendors to reach the group, set Who can post to Anyone on the web — and the Admin console must allow group owners to accept email from outside the organization. An alias (Admin console, Directory → Users) is quicker but lands in one person’s inbox.

Web hosts: create a real mailbox rather than a forwarder — only a mailbox can be connected to accounting tools over IMAP.

Naming the address and where to publish it

invoices@ is the clearest choice in English; ap@ or accounts-payable@ work too. billing@ is ambiguous, because many companies use it for the invoices they send. Buying from German suppliers? Add rechnung@ to the same mailbox. Skip personal names and general addresses such as info@, where invoices drown in enquiries and spam, and send your own sales invoices from a different address so customer replies stay out of the payables queue.

Publish the address wherever vendors look for a billing contact:

on purchase orders, with a line such as “Please send all invoices to invoices@yourcompany.com”,
in contracts and vendor onboarding forms,
in your customer accounts with online services,
in the email signatures of the people who buy things,
next to the contact details on your website.

Moving your vendors to the new address

Creating the address takes ten minutes; moving the vendors takes weeks. The setting goes by many names, but the pattern is the same:

Open the billing or account section and look for a separate billing contact. If there is one, enter the invoice address and leave the login address alone.
If there’s only one address, the login is also the billing contact. Moving the whole account to a role address is usually worth it — but whoever reads that inbox can then also reset the password.
Watch for a verification link sent to the new address; someone has to click it from inside the invoice mailbox.
Vendors without a portal get a short email: “From now on, please send invoices for customer number 12345 only to invoices@yourcompany.com. Our address and bank details stay the same.”
Keep a switch list with vendor, customer number, date changed and the column that matters: has the first invoice arrived at the new address?

Three examples:

Google Workspace: in the Admin console, go to Billing → Payment accounts, open View payment settings next to your subscription and add a contact under Payments contacts with the email preference All payments email. Google sends a verification email; until it’s confirmed, the contact shows as “Pending” (Google help).
Microsoft 365: under Billing → Billing notifications in the admin center, set the organization contact email to your invoice address and use Edit notification settings to attach invoice PDFs. With a Microsoft Customer Agreement billing account, add the address as an additional recipient in the billing profile instead (Microsoft guide).
AWS: set the billing contact under Alternate contacts on the Account page, then enable PDF invoices delivery by email in Billing preferences. AWS emails invoices to the root user and the alternate billing contact, and recommends a company address over a personal one.

From the invoice inbox to your books

A shared address solves half the problem: every invoice still has to be checked, matched to its payment and handed to your accountant. Apart from working through the inbox by hand, there are two automated routes:

Forwarding: many accounting tools and receipt services have an upload address that a rule can forward to. In Microsoft 365, automatic forwarding to external addresses is usually blocked by default, and forwarded mail bounces with error 5.7.520 until an admin allows external forwarding in the outbound spam policy. Gmail first sends a verification link to the target address.
Connecting the mailbox: tools that read the mailbox themselves — through Google or Microsoft sign-in, or over IMAP — need no rule. Step-by-step guides: Outlook and Microsoft 365, Gmail and IMAP mailboxes.

How it works with belege.ai

belege.ai supports both routes. You can connect Gmail and Google Workspace with Google sign-in, and Outlook and Microsoft 365 with Microsoft sign-in — read-only, with no mailbox password stored. A shared mailbox such as invoices@yourcompany.com is added by its address, and access is checked before it’s saved. It must live in Exchange Online, and if your company tenant requires an admin to approve the app first, belege.ai tells you. Other providers connect over IMAP, with the password stored encrypted and the login tested first (see integrations).

The agent then searches the mailbox for the invoice behind every open bank transaction, including email bodies and download links. By default it also checks new mail daily and imports invoices, receipts, credit notes and payment confirmations from PDF attachments — but not quotes, order confirmations or delivery notes.

Forwarding goes to your personal address, such as firstname.lastname@belege.ai; forwarding rules and BCC both work (see receipts by email). Mail from your own login address is processed right away. When a new sender turns up — for example because a rule auto-forwards a vendor invoice — you confirm them once in Telegram (approve, reject or trust the sender). Mail without a valid DKIM signature isn’t processed.

For a shared or IMAP mailbox, connecting directly is usually simpler: no rule an admin can block, no sender approvals. A Google group has no mailbox of its own, so connect the Gmail inbox that receives the group’s mail, or forward.

Invoice fraud and spoofed senders

An invoice address printed on every purchase order is known to fraudsters too. The classic move: a look-alike vendor email announces “new bank details” or sends a convincing invoice with a different IBAN. Sometimes the vendor’s real mailbox has been compromised, so even the sender address is genuine.

Never change bank details based on an email alone. Call back on a number you already had, not one from the email. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center likewise advises verifying account-change requests through a second channel.
Four eyes on vendor master data: a second person approves every IBAN change.
Compare the IBAN before paying: a mismatch with your records is a stop sign, not a typo.
Leave unexpected attachments closed: “invoice” is a classic subject line for malware, especially with zip files or macro-enabled documents.

For your own domain, SPF lists which servers may send email in your name, DKIM signs each message cryptographically, and DMARC tells receiving servers what to do with mail that fails those checks. That makes it harder to send fake invoices from your address; the UK National Cyber Security Centre’s email security and anti-spoofing guidance walks your IT team through the setup.

How long to keep invoices and emails

Retention depends on which country’s tax law applies to you. For a business taxed in Germany:

Invoices are accounting vouchers (Buchungsbelege) and must be kept for eight years from the end of the calendar year in which they were issued (Section 147(3) AO, Section 14b UStG).
Business letters (Handels- und Geschäftsbriefe) you receive, and copies of those you send, must be kept for six years (Section 257(4) HGB). Only correspondence about a business transaction counts — a price confirmation, a complaint, a credit-note agreement. Whether an email itself must be kept is explained in our glossary entry Handelsbrief (German).
E-invoices: at least the structured part — the XML file — must be kept unaltered in its original form; a PDF rendering of it isn’t enough.

Wherever you are, three rules apply to the invoice inbox:

A mailbox is not an archive. In a Microsoft 365 shared mailbox you can’t stop members from deleting messages, so keep invoices in your accounting software or document archive as well.
Move, don’t delete. Use folders or labels such as “Done 2026” instead.
Watch the storage limit. A full shared mailbox eventually stops accepting mail, and vendors get a bounce.

Common mistakes

The address forwards to one person. New name, same problem.
An out-of-office reply on the invoice address. It sends replies nobody needs, and two autoresponders can end up answering each other.
A catch-all instead of a fixed address. Every spam variant lands in the invoice queue, and fake invoices hide among the junk.
Untested forwarding. The admin blocks external forwarding and nobody notices. Test every change with an email from outside.
Invoices in the system twice. Connecting the mailbox, forwarding and uploading PDFs by hand produces duplicates — see how to prevent duplicate invoices.
Deleting an old mailbox too early. Keep a leaver’s address as an alias for a while, or convert their Microsoft 365 mailbox to a shared mailbox until every vendor has switched.

Setup checklist

Choose the setup: shared mailbox (Microsoft 365), collaborative inbox or dedicated account (Google Workspace), real mailbox (web host).
Create invoices@ and add variants such as rechnung@ to the same mailbox.
Give at least two people access and agree who covers for whom.
Allow external senders (groups and distribution lists need this) and test with an email from outside.
Set up folders or labels and agree that nothing gets deleted.
No out-of-office reply, no catch-all.
Publish the address on purchase orders, contracts, signatures and your website.
Move vendors using a switch list and tick off each first invoice received.
Connect the mailbox to your bookkeeping or set up forwarding, then follow the first real invoice all the way into the books.
Agree the rule for bank-detail changes: a call-back on a known number plus a second approval.

After three months, compare your bank statement with the invoice inbox: payments without an invoice point to vendors still using old addresses. belege.ai can also match invoices to bank transactions for you.