AP automation that checks the bill, not just captures it
The free plan processes 25 invoices a month with unlimited users, takes no credit card and does not expire. You get your own intake address at the end of setup.
- Bill to
- Harborview Apartments
- Service
- Grounds care, monthly
- Amount due
- $1,595.00
- Coded
- Harborview · Landscaping
Bright Green Landscaping has billed exactly $1,450.00 for Harborview Apartments every month since November.
- Usual
- $1,450.00
- last 9 invoices, Nov–Jul
- This one
- $1,595.00
- +$145.00 (+10.0%)
This doesn’t hold the bill or contact the vendor.
Capture is finished. The check after it is not.
Every AP tool in the market can get an invoice out of an inbox, and QuickBooks Online does it for nothing. The question worth asking a vendor is what their software does with the invoice once it has it.
inletAP compares each arriving bill against three things you already own: what that vendor has billed for that property before, the approval thresholds you already wrote down, and every invoice you already hold from that vendor.
Your own ladder, not a generic rule
The baseline is what that vendor billed for that property — never averaged across the portfolio — and the approval ladder you already wrote. Nobody selling into a five-building portfolio at a published price holds either.
A finding does not hold the bill
It never contacts the vendor either. The one exception is a top-tier duplicate, which cannot be exported until a person decides.
When it is not sure, it asks
Confidence is scored per field. A document whose key fields score below 70% goes to a review queue rather than on to an approver, and a rule can quarantine a sender outright.
Capture is a mechanism, not the pitch
Documents arrive the way they already do — a vendor-facing intake address, an upload, or a forward from the mailbox you use today. The address is not your mailbox, so nothing else in your mail is visible to inletAP.
What a manual AP process costs, and the four parts every AP tool has
A manual AP process is a sequence of small transcriptions. Someone opens a shared mailbox, downloads an attachment, reads a total off a page and types it into a ledger.
Then they decide which account and which property it belongs to, forward it to whoever has to approve it, and wait.
Ardent Partners puts the average fully-loaded cost of that sequence at $9.84 a document, with best-in-class AP operations at $2.65 against $12.42 for all others (State of ePayables 2025).
The mechanical half is four capabilities working together. Capture, so the document arrives in structured form. Extraction, so the fields come out without being typed. Coding, so the GL account comes from a rule and the property is read off the invoice. Routing, so approval is a policy rather than an email thread.
Posting to the ledger is the last and easiest step. All of it is table stakes, and none of it is the reason to buy.
Portals shift the work onto vendors who have no incentive to adopt them, and paper capture shifts it onto your own staff. So email stays the sensible mechanism — but it is a mechanism, not a differentiator.
Extraction on long-tail vendor layouts is genuinely hard, and a system that returns a confident wrong number is worse than one that asks. The review screen totals the line items against the stated total and names any variance.
Capabilities
What runs on every invoice, in the order it matters
A second look on every bill
Nine checks against your own history: a fixed contract amount that moved, a price above the usual at this property, a bill just under an approval threshold, several bills in a week that clear one together, a possible duplicate, and changed bank details on an invoice.
Extraction — per-field confidence
Vendor, invoice number, dates, totals, tax and line items, each with its own score and the evidence it was read from. PDFs, image files, photos and Office documents.
Coding — rules, not memory
Map a source email or sender domain to a vendor, a vendor or property to a default GL account, and a document to a named reviewer. Rules run in priority order and every match is explained on the document.
Routing — policy, not email
Amount tiers, per-property approvers, and SLA timers with an overdue alert. Low-confidence extractions stop in the review queue before they can reach an approver. Approvers see why an invoice reached them.
Duplicate control
The attachment fingerprint and a vendor / number / date / amount comparison, run after extraction — nine matching rules and six guards. A top-tier match is held back from export until a person decides.
Purchase orders — 2-way PO matching with balance tracking
inletAP matches supplier invoices to purchase orders. It reads the PO number from the invoice, finds the purchase order (imported from a spreadsheet, entered by hand, or read from QuickBooks Online or Xero), checks the vendor and the amount against what is left on it, and sends a mismatch to review. On every plan, including Free.
Capture — a mechanism, not a promise
Your own intake subdomain with an organization-wide address plus per-property mailboxes, live the moment they are created. Attachments are parsed out server-side; invoices typed into the email body work too, and so does an upload.
Export — traceable and idempotent
QuickBooks Online and Xero bills, or a CSV whose columns you define yourself, with external IDs recorded so a batch reconciles back to the original document and a retry cannot double-post.
How far back the checks look
Baselines are kept per vendor AND property, because the same landscaper can be on a contract at one building and time-and-materials at another.
The duplicate comparison runs against up to 200 of your most recent invoices from that vendor, going back two years, and the result is a finding on the document.
Separately, the same message arriving twice is refused at the door on a message-ID and raw-body key.
Why this one
Where inletAP differs from the rest of the category
- Every bill is checked against your own history and your own approval ladder, from the first invoice, with nothing to set up. Most of the category stops at capture and coding.
- Coding is property-shaped: property, unit, ownership entity, GL account and cost center are fields on the document, and the QuickBooks class is derived from the property at export — not free text on a company-shaped record.
- A building carries its own GL and cost center defaults, so a new invoice for it inherits them.
- Capture is email, and we treat it as the mechanism it is. There is no supplier portal for your vendors to ignore and no paper to capture by hand for your staff.
- Confidence is per field, so you fix the one uncertain value rather than re-checking a whole document that scored 84%.
- Pricing is published, including a free tier — you can prove extraction works on your own vendors before speaking to anyone.
- There is no implementation project, no professional services engagement and no annual minimum — see what that looks like for a small management company.
- It does not try to be your ledger or your property management system, so adopting it is not a migration.
Compare
How the category is usually structured
| inletAP | Enterprise AP suites | Horizontal SMB AP | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary capture point | Email to a dedicated address | Supplier portal, paper capture, EDI | Email plus upload |
| Built around | Property and entity coding | Procurement and PO matching | One company ledger |
| Pricing visibility | Published, with a free tier | Demo required | Usually published |
| Time to first processed invoice | Same session | Weeks of implementation | Days |
| Payment rails | None — bills only | Included | Usually included |
| Typical buyer | Property management finance team | Procurement department | General SMB finance |
If you need payment rails, or invoices checked against goods received in a procurement system, inletAP is not the right shape of product for you. Moving off Hubdoc? See what inletAP covers of that surface and what it does not.
Pricing
Free for 25 invoices a month, every month — then $39 to $249
Priced per processed invoice document, in tiers, with overage from $0.18. Users are unlimited on every plan, including the free one, so approvers are never a line item.
The free plan resets every month and does not expire, so a buyer can run a whole month-end close on it without a card. No implementation fee, no annual minimum, and no call required to find out the number.
If you would rather test extraction than read about it, email one invoice to the Invoice Inbox Test first — no account and no card.
Prices are in US dollars and exclude sales tax, which is added where it applies.
Paid plans renew automatically at the price shown — every month, or every 12 months on annual billing — until you cancel. Cancel any time in billing settings: the next renewal stops and you keep the period you have already paid for.
Accounts payable automation — common questions
What is accounts payable automation?
How is inletAP different from other AP automation software?
Does AP automation replace my accounting system?
How accurate is automated invoice extraction?
How long does AP automation take to implement?
Does it pay the invoices too?
Start free and run your own invoices through it
25 invoices a month, unlimited users, no credit card. Send this month's vendor bills and watch each one get checked, coded and posted to your books.