Please Confirm Receipt: What It Means and How to Reply

"Please confirm receipt" means the sender wants a short reply saying their email, file or payment reached you. It asks only for an acknowledgment. Replies you can copy:

1. "Confirming receipt, thank you. I'll review it and get back to you by Friday."
2. "Received, thanks. The invoice and the PDF both came through."
3. "Got it, thank you. I've passed this to our accounts team."

Table of contents

1. Asking for it: polite ways to request a confirmation
2. Replying: what a good confirmation says
3. Invoices and receipts: confirming a bill, then getting it into your books

How do you ask someone to confirm receipt?

Put the request in one plain sentence at the end of your email and name what you sent. "Please confirm receipt of the attached contract" suits formal mail. "Could you let me know this came through?" is friendlier. "Please acknowledge receipt" means the same thing and is common in legal and finance mail. If timing matters, add a date: "Please confirm receipt by Thursday."

One request per email keeps the reply easy.

Recipients can often decline read receipts, so a written reply is the better record.

How do you reply to "please confirm receipt"?

Reply soon, say what arrived and say what happens next. Open the attachments before you answer, so you confirm what actually came through. For example: "Received with thanks. The signed agreement and both PDFs came through, and I'll send comments by Monday." If a file is missing or won't open, say so in the same reply.

A one-line reply is usually enough.

For formal letters, "I acknowledge receipt of your letter dated October 3" works. With colleagues, "Got it, thanks" is fine. "Well received" is common in international business email but can read oddly to US readers.

What if the email is an invoice or receipt?

Confirm it the same way, then record it. A supplier who asks you to confirm receipt of an invoice wants to know it reached the right person and that nothing is missing. Reply with the invoice number and when you expect to pay it. Then get it into your books before newer email buries it.

That last step is the one that slips.

DocStreamAI handles that step for you: it finds supplier invoices and receipts in your inbox, reads them with AI and posts them to QuickBooks Online or Xero with the file attached.

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