Recipe
Split a subscription bill without ever opening the app
A shared Netflix, Spotify Family, or SaaS renewal arrives in your inbox every month with the exact charge already itemized. Forward it to your Split The Bill address and it becomes a bill on its own — no photo, no manual entry.
Last reviewed: September 2026
Subscription invoices are the receipts that never had a paper form to begin with — they're born as email and stay there. Photographing a phone screen showing an email is a workaround, not a real solution, and re-typing the same $19.99 charge every month is the kind of busywork Split The Bill exists to remove. Email-to-bill (a Pro feature) gives your account a personal forwarding address: approve the sender once, then forward the renewal email itself, and the app reads the vendor and total straight from it.
Step-by-step
- 1
Get your forwarding address
On Pro, open Settings → Email-to-bill and copy your personal forwarding address. It's tied to your account only.
- 2
Add the subscription's sender as trusted
Add your own email address (the one the renewal comes to) to the trusted-sender list — or, if a partner's inbox receives it, add theirs. Without this step, the forward is quarantined, not filed.
- 3
Forward the renewal email
When the Netflix, Spotify Family, or SaaS renewal lands, forward it as-is to your Split The Bill address. Most mail clients let you set up a filter so this happens automatically for that one sender every month.
- 4
Review and split
The app reads the vendor and total from the email and creates a bill. Open it, confirm the amount, and split it across your household or group the same way you'd split a photographed receipt.
Why this beats a screenshot
A screenshot of a subscription email is still a photo — it goes through the same OCR path as a paper receipt, reading pixels instead of the actual text. Forwarding the email hands the app clean data directly: the real vendor name, the real amount, no risk of a blurry crop or a cut-off total.
It repeats without you
Once the sender is trusted, forwarding the same renewal each month takes one tap, or set up an inbox filter and it happens without you touching anything. The app doesn't auto-renew the SPLIT for you — you still confirm the bill each time — but getting the receipt in stops being the friction.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to forward the invoice every month?▾
Yes, forwarding itself isn't automatic on our side — but most email clients let you set a filter that auto-forwards mail from a specific sender, so once you've configured that, it effectively runs itself.
What if the subscription is billed to a family member's email?▾
Add their address to your trusted-sender list (Settings → Email-to-bill), and forwards from that inbox will be accepted the same way as your own.
Is this available on the Free plan?▾
No — email-to-bill is Pro-only ($7/month or $70/year). On Free, add the same subscription charge manually each month instead.
Free tier covers most recipes. Pro is 100 receipts every 30 days + private invite links.
