How to rename invoices with the invoice number on Mac

What this does

Filing invoices by month gets you most of the way to organized, but when you’re hunting for one specific invoice, its own reference number is often the fastest thing to search for. This rule finds the invoice number printed inside the PDF and uses it to rename the file, so “INV-1049” becomes part of the filename itself rather than something you’d have to open the document to see.

This is the one rule in this guide that uses a regex capture, a search pattern that finds and pulls out a specific piece of text. You don’t need to understand regex to use it, since this exact pattern is copied straight from the built in template, but it’s worth knowing what it’s doing: it looks for the word “invoice”, skips past a short run of filler words like “number” or “no.”, then grabs the first thing after that which actually looks like an ID, a mix of letters and digits containing at least one digit. That last part matters: an earlier, simpler version of this pattern accidentally grabbed the word “Invoice” itself off a line reading “Invoice / Invoice number IN-75533938”, because it happily accepted any word rather than holding out for something that looked like an ID.

What you’ll build

A rule that matches PDFs mentioning invoice, then renames each using the invoice number captured from its own text.

Open the rule editor

This walkthrough happens inside FilesAutomator itself, so install it from the Mac App Store first if you have not already, then open it. In its toolbar, choose Add, then New Automation Rule.

Name the rule and choose a folder

Name it something like “Rename my invoices with the invoice number” and use Add Folder to choose the folder your invoices land in.

Build the condition

Leave the top group set to “All of the following are true”.

Add a condition: Extension is pdf.

Choose Add Group to nest a second group, set its operator to “Any of the following is true”, and add two conditions inside it: Name contains invoice, and PDF text contains invoice.

FilesAutomator

Add the action steps

Step 1: Rename

Choose Add Step, then Rename. In “New name, built from the parts below”, use Add Part, then Regex capture. Change its source to Content, then paste this pattern into “What to look for”:

(?i)invoice[\s\S]{0,30}?([A-Za-z]{0,5}-?\d[\dA-Za-z-]{2,})

Add Part again, choose Text, and type an underscore. Add Part once more and choose Original name.

FilesAutomator

Turn it on

Select Create Automation Rule, then switch the rule on. Every matching invoice now gets its own invoice number worked right into the filename.

A faster way

The template gallery inside FilesAutomator already has this rule ready to install, named Rename invoices with the invoice number.