Why hasn't my invoice appeared?

This is the most common support question we get, and in almost every case the invoice is somewhere findable rather than gone. Work through the checks in order. They are arranged by how often each turns out to be the answer, not by how interesting it is.

Before anything else: a document is queued as soon as the mail is accepted, but a large scanned PDF takes longer to read than a one-page text invoice, and a busy queue adds to that. If the message arrived a minute ago, refresh before you investigate.

0. Is it in the app, but not where you are looking?

Three clicks, before you go anywhere near your mail provider. In Inbox, search the list for the vendor name. Open Inbox → Filtered. Open Review Queue.

Between them those settle "it arrived and I am looking in the wrong place", which is a different question from "it never arrived". The checks below answer the second one.

1. Was it sent to a real intake address?

Open Settings → Mailboxes and compare the address, character by character, against what the sender used.

Three failures account for nearly all of these:

• The address was mistyped. Mail to an address that does not exist on your subdomain is rejected at the door, so there is no record of it in inletAP to find. The sender will have a bounce message. Ask for it.
• The invoice went to your own company address. inletAP receives mail on addresses it controls — an address on your workspace's subdomain of inlet-ap.com. It cannot receive mail addressed to a domain you own, and neither can anybody else's product, because routing for your domain is decided by your DNS and your mail provider. That case is check 2.
• The message was too big. inletAP refuses a message over 20 MB at the door, permanently, so the sender gets a bounce and there is nothing here to find. A scanned lease, a photo set from a site visit, or a long forwarded chain with every attachment still on it are the usual causes. Ask the vendor to send the invoice as its own message.

invoices@yourcompany.inlet-ap.com   an intake address; mail arrives here
ap@yourcompany.com                  your own domain; only arrives if you forward it

Each mailbox shows when it last received a message, and a running total of everything it has ever received. The useful field here is the last-received timestamp: a mailbox whose last message predates the invoice you are chasing is a strong signal that the mail never arrived rather than that it arrived and got lost.

2. Is forwarding actually configured?

If vendors still write to ap@yourcompany.com, that mail reaches inletAP only if your provider auto-forwards it to an intake address.

Check, at your own mail provider:

• The forwarding rule exists and is enabled.
• It applies to the messages in question, and not only to mail matching a filter that this invoice missed.
• It forwards, rather than redirecting to a group that drops attachments.
• It has not been suspended by your provider, which some do after a bounce.

Send yourself a test invoice through the same path the vendor uses. If your test arrives and the vendor's did not, the difference is in the vendor's message, not your configuration. See email forwarding for the setup in full.

3. Was it flagged as a duplicate?

Nothing is filed away as a duplicate without you. If the same email is delivered twice, the second delivery is collapsed at the door and no second document is created — that is the one case where an invoice you expected simply is not there.

Everything else surfaces as a card, not as a hidden document: after extraction, inletAP compares the invoice against the ones you already hold and, if it matches, raises a duplicate card on the newer document naming the older one. The document itself sits in the inbox in its normal status. Only a person pressing Mark duplicate moves it to the duplicate status.

The comparison rules, and the guards that stop an ordinary monthly bill or a vendor statement being reported as a copy, are in duplicate detection.

4. Was it filtered as not an invoice?

Everything ingested is judged before extraction. Newsletters, auto-replies, bounces, calendar invites and covering notes with nothing to read are given the filtered status.

Filtered documents have their own tab in the inbox, with a count: Inbox → Filtered. They are not in the main list, which is deliberate: rendering a marketing email as an invoice with no vendor and a zero total helps nobody. The tab searches by sender, subject or reason, and every row shows when it arrived and why it was set aside.

If the judgment was wrong, the This is an invoice button on that row puts the document back into the queue and it is read normally. Filtering happens before extraction, so a filtered document has never counted against your plan, and putting one back is not a way of paying twice.

A person can set a document aside too. Not an invoice on the invoice screen, on the web or in the phone app, moves a document that is waiting for review, quarantined, marked as a duplicate or held on quota to Filtered, with an optional reason. The Filtered screen then says who marked it, when, and why. Nothing is deleted: the audit log keeps the record, and This is an invoice brings the document back and reads it again. An invoice waiting for approval has to be rejected first, and an approved or exported one cannot be set aside. If the document was counted against your plan this month and the month is still inside its allowance, the count goes back down by one. A document counted in an earlier month, or after the month went over its allowance, stays counted.

An attachment nothing could open — a corrupt file, an unsupported archive — is not filtered. It goes straight into the review queue with the reason recorded, because a file we could not read is a question for a person rather than a judgment that it was never an invoice. Look in Review Queue for those.

5. Is it held on quota?

On the free plan the allowance is a hard cap: 25 processed documents a month. Beyond that, documents are received and parsed but not extracted, and they sit in held_quota.

You will see a banner at the top of the inbox counting the held documents. They are held, not lost — the parsed source text is already stored, and they are released when you upgrade or when the billing period rolls over. See plans and limits for exactly how release works.

Paid plans do not hold anything. If you are on a paid plan, this check is not your answer.

6. Is it quarantined?

A rule can quarantine a document as a policy hold — an unrecognized sender, an attachment type you do not accept. A quarantined document has already been read and coded — the quarantine is the last thing the rules step does — and it then waits for a person. It has consumed one processed invoice.

If your workspace has quarantine rules, look there. If it does not, this check takes two seconds and you can move on. Rules are listed in priority order on the Rules screen, so you can see which conditions could have caught the document. See the rules reference.

What each state looks like

The last two rows are the ones that catch people. inletAP can only tell you about mail it received. If none of the states above matches, the question moves to your mail provider rather than to this product, and the sender's own delivery record — which carries the bounce, size refusal included — is the fastest place to settle it.

One more thing

If your team suddenly sends an implausible volume of mail into one workspace in an hour — a mailbox loop is the usual cause — the excess is stored rather than parsed, as a safety valve. The ceiling is set far above any real AP volume, so this is rare. The messages are retained in full, but there is no self-serve re-queue: if you think this has happened, email us and we will replay them.

Still stuck

Write to support@inlet-ap.com with the sender's address, the intake address it was sent to, and the approximate time. Those three details are usually enough to trace a message end to end.