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Why Finding Receipts in Meta and LinkedIn Ads Is Absolute Hell

February 1, 2025 · Poyan Karimi

I've made peace with most SaaS billing. Now. Thanks to ReceiptBot. No more drama there.

The real headache now is Meta and LinkedIn.

These companies make billions from advertisers – and they can't send a damn receipt to your inbox.

Let me rant.

Meta Business Manager: A maze designed by sadists

You'd think a company worth $1.5 trillion could build a billing system that makes sense. You'd be wrong.

Here's what finding a receipt in Meta Business Manager looks like:

  1. Log into Business Manager (hope you remember which account)
  2. Click the hamburger menu
  3. Find "Billing" (it moves around, good luck)
  4. Select the right ad account (if you have multiple, god help you)
  5. Click "Payment Activity"
  6. Find the right date range
  7. Click the transaction
  8. Download PDF

That's 8 steps. For a receipt. That they could have just emailed you.

But wait – did you set up the right admin permissions? Is your payment method connected to the right business? Are you in the right Business Manager or the old Ads Manager? Who knows. Nobody knows.

I've been running ads for 10+ years and I still get lost in there.

LinkedIn Campaign Manager: Same chaos, worse UI

LinkedIn saw Meta's terrible system and said "hold my beer."

Finding a receipt in LinkedIn Campaign Manager:

  1. Log into Campaign Manager
  2. Click your account name (top left, tiny)
  3. Find "Billing" in the dropdown
  4. Click "Billing History"
  5. Find the right month
  6. Click "Download"
  7. Pray it actually downloads

And if you have multiple ad accounts across multiple company pages? Start over. Each one is a separate universe.

The UI feels like it was designed in 2012 and hasn't been touched since. Because it probably was.

Why don't they just email receipts?

Seriously. Stripe does it. Every e-commerce store does it. Even my local pizza place emails me a receipt.

But Meta and LinkedIn – platforms that exist to take money from advertisers – decided that's too complicated.

My theory: they don't care. You're already locked in. You need their ads. They have no competition (Meta owns Facebook AND Instagram, LinkedIn owns professional networking). So why invest in making billing easy?

It's not a bug. It's contempt.

The accountant problem

Every quarter, same conversation:

Accountant: "I need your Meta receipts."

Me: "I'll send them over."

45 minutes later, after clicking through 17 screens

Me: "Here's... most of them. I think."

Multiply this by every small business owner, every freelancer, every marketing agency. Millions of hours wasted, globally, because two tech giants can't build a billing system.

What could actually fix this

A few ideas I'm playing with:

Option 1: Browser extension A little plugin that logs into your ad accounts and grabs all receipts automatically. Click once, get everything. Could work – but browser extensions are fiddly and break when Meta changes their UI (which they do constantly, for no reason).

Option 2: API integration Both Meta and LinkedIn have APIs. In theory, you could pull billing data programmatically. In practice, their APIs are a nightmare and require 47 levels of permissions. But maybe my team of Claudes can figure it out.

Option 3: Meta and LinkedIn just... fix it? Hahahaha. Sorry. Had to include this for completeness. It's not happening.

Option 4: A dedicated "Ad Receipt" tool Something that connects to all the major ad platforms – Meta, LinkedIn, Google Ads, TikTok – and pulls receipts into one dashboard. Like ReceiptBot, but for ad spend specifically.

Honestly? Option 4 is tempting. If enough people hate this as much as I do, maybe that's the next project.

Let me know if you'd use it.

TL;DR

  • Meta Business Manager is a maze
  • LinkedIn Campaign Manager is worse
  • Neither sends receipts to email like normal companies
  • Finding ad receipts takes 10+ clicks and 15+ minutes
  • They don't care because you're locked in anyway
  • I'm thinking about building something to fix this
  • Stay tuned (or yell at me on Twitter to prioritize it)

This rant was brought to you by 12 years of hunting for ad receipts and one very frustrated entrepreneur.

P.S. If anyone from Meta or LinkedIn reads this: just email the receipts. That's it. That's the feature request.