Secure Invoice Storage

Invoices, receipts, purchase orders, and remittance advices are financial records you must produce on demand — for an audit, a tax authority, a chargeback dispute, or a customer who lost their copy — sometimes years after they were issued. They are also sensitive: an invoice carries names, addresses, amounts, and often payment references, so it should never sit at a guessable URL. files.link is built for that exact pair of requirements: long-lived, organized retention plus private access.

Store invoices as private files. They have no public URL; when your billing portal or accounting tool needs to show a document, your backend mints a short-lived signed URL for that one request, so the file is reachable only by the authenticated user who asked for it, and a copied link expires within minutes. Everything is encrypted at rest and moves over TLS.

Organization is what makes retrieval painless. Use projects and folders to mirror how finance already thinks — by client, by fiscal year, by month, or by entity — so producing every invoice for one customer during an audit is a single folder fetch rather than a database-wide query. Automation closes the loop with your systems of record. When Stripe fires an invoice.paid webhook, or your accounting software generates a PDF, push it straight into the three-call upload — POST /v1/files/{folderId} for a presigned URL, PUT the PDF, POST /v1/files/confirm-upload — and store the returned permanent link on the invoice record in your database.

Now the document and the row reference each other and nothing is stranded in a provider's dashboard. For records past their active life — invoices older than your everyday lookback window but still inside your statutory retention period — move them to the cold storage tier, which keeps them durably at a lower cost for the years you must hold them before they can be deleted.

Because links are permanent, an invoice you stored in 2026 resolves identically in 2033 when an auditor asks for it. Prepaid credits keep the running cost of a growing archive predictable, rather than metering each retrieval as a separate request charge.