Accounts payable automation that starts at the mailbox, not the scanner
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.
What accounts payable automation actually removes
The value is not in the posting. It is in everything before the posting — opening the mail, reading the PDF, deciding what the invoice is for, and getting the right person to say yes.
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, decides which account and which property it belongs to, then forwards it to whoever has to approve it and waits. Category research puts the cost of that sequence at roughly $15 a document, and around 68% of AP teams are still doing it by hand.
Automating it means four capabilities working together: capture, so the document arrives in structured form rather than as an attachment someone has to open; extraction, so the fields come out without being typed; coding, so the account, class and cost center are applied by rule rather than by memory; and routing, so approval is a policy rather than an email thread. Posting to the ledger is the last and easiest step.
The step most tools get wrong is capture. Portals shift the work onto vendors who have no incentive to adopt them, and scanning shifts it onto your own staff. Email is the only capture point that already has universal adoption — every vendor you work with can already send one, and most of them already do.
What matters after capture is what the software does when it is not sure. Extraction on long-tail vendor layouts is genuinely hard, and a system that returns a confident wrong number is worse than one that asks. InletAP scores confidence per field, sends anything below your threshold to a review queue, and always escalates an unmapped vendor or line items that do not sum to the stated total.
Capabilities
The four capabilities, and how InletAP implements each
Capture — email, not a portal
A DNS-verified subdomain with a catch-all address and per-property mailboxes. Full MIME parsing pulls attachments out server-side; invoices typed into the email body work too.
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, scans, photos and Office documents.
Coding — rules, not memory
Map source email to vendor, vendor to default GL account and property, amount threshold to approver. Ordered, explainable, and simulated against the last 500 documents before going live.
Routing — policy, not email
Amount tiers, per-property approvers, escalation on low confidence, SLA timers with overdue alerts. Approvers see why an invoice reached them.
Duplicate control
Message ID, attachment fingerprint and a vendor / number / date / amount heuristic, applied at ingest — before a second copy can reach an approver.
Export — traceable and idempotent
QuickBooks Online bills or a mapped CSV, with external IDs recorded so a batch reconciles back to the original document and a retry cannot double-post.
Why this one
Where InletAP differs from the rest of the category
- Capture is email. There is no supplier portal for your vendors to ignore and no scanner for your staff to operate.
- Coding is property-shaped: property, unit, entity, GL account, class and cost center are fields on the document, not attributes of the company.
- 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.
- 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, scanning, EDI | Email plus upload |
| Built around | Property, unit 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 three-way PO matching against a procurement system, InletAP is not the right shape of product for you.
Pricing
Free for 25 invoices a month, then $39 to $249
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
Start free and run your own invoices through it
25 processed invoices a month, unlimited users, no credit card. Point a few vendors at your intake address and see the extraction, the coding and the audit trail on your own documents.