I have created a board that is powered by a lithium cell and instead of a regulator I am using a silicone diode to step the voltage down to a safe value instead of the regulator, This means my input voltage could be anything between about 2.6-3.6V.
I have also added a voltage divider and connected to the ADC pin and the battery but not sure how to best continue from there.
For ATMEGA328 chips I read the vcc by comparing with the internal 1.1v reference voltage then I use this when calculating the battery reading via the voltage divider.
For background the board is a ESP07 with a nRF24L01+ radio and USB charger and lithium protection and i2c to drive an OLED display. Picture attached below.