Quickstart
The aim of this page is to get one genuine invoice all the way through inletAP — from a file on your desk or a message in your mail, to a coded, approved bill sitting in your ledger. It takes about fifteen minutes, most of which is waiting for your accounting system to think about it.
Use a real invoice. Test data is reassuring and proves nothing; the whole point is to find out how inletAP handles the particular mess your vendors send you.
Before you start
You will need three things:
- One real invoice. A PDF sitting on your computer is the quickest, because you can upload it in the next few minutes without asking anybody for anything. An invoice that arrived by email works just as well, and so does a photograph of a paper bill or an invoice typed into the body of a message.
- Access to QuickBooks Online or Xero, if you want the last step to post automatically. If you run neither, you can still finish this guide — the export becomes a CSV file instead.
- About fifteen minutes. There is no implementation project, no professional services engagement and nobody from our side who needs to be on a call.
1. Create your workspace
Sign-up is six short steps — your details, your workspace, your first intake address, your data, your plan, done. Two of them ask you to choose something you cannot change afterwards.
Your inbound subdomain. Your workspace claims a subdomain of inlet-ap.com: the yourcompany in yourcompany.inlet-ap.com. It is suggested from the workspace name you type, you can edit it, and the screen checks it is free as you go. Choose it with the care you would give a domain name — once the workspace is created the field locks, it cannot be changed afterwards, and every intake address you ever publish sits on it.
Your first intake address. You type the part before the @. The default is ap, and invoices or bills read just as well; the screen shows you the whole address as you type:
ap@yourcompany.inlet-ap.com
That address is real from the moment the step completes. You can send it an invoice before you have configured anything else at all, which is precisely what we are about to do. Like the subdomain, it is permanent: a mailbox cannot be renamed or deleted, so read it back before you continue. See intake addresses.
The remaining steps do not hold you up. "Your data" offers the spreadsheet import — skip it for now, it has its own page. "Plan" starts you on Free, with no card.
The last screen shows your intake address with a copy button, and from then on it is listed under Settings → Mailboxes.
2. Put an invoice in
There are two doors, and they reach the same pipeline. Use the first one now, because it depends on nobody but you.
Upload it — the fastest way to see this work
Open Inbox and press Upload invoice. Drag the file onto the dialog, or browse for it. You can add several at once.
An upload is not a lesser path. The file is turned into the message an emailed invoice would have produced, and it runs the same parse, extraction, coding, review and export. Nothing downstream can tell the difference, and nothing about a vendor, a mail provider or a forwarding rule has to be arranged first.
Three things worth knowing before you press the button:
- PDFs, photographs, Word files, spreadsheets and plain text, up to 20 MB each. Twenty accepted extensions in all — see what you can send.
- Each file is sent on its own and gets its own answer. A file that is refused stays in the dialog with the reason printed on it, and the others still go.
- The same file twice is refused, with "This file has already been uploaded". The check is on the bytes, so a renamed copy of the same file is still the same file.
A row appears in the list the moment a file leaves your browser, and fills in as the invoice is read.
Or send it to your intake address — the door for real volume
Forward the invoice to the address the last sign-up screen showed you, listed at any time under Settings → Mailboxes.
Forward it, do not retype it. inletAP reads the MIME structure of the message, pulls the attachments out server-side, and reads the body text as well — so a vendor who cannot be persuaded to attach a PDF is still handled.
This is the door that matters once you are past the first week, because nobody has to do anything for it to work: the vendor sends, and the invoice is in the queue. Uploading is what you reach for when the invoice came to you as a file, or when somebody hands you paper. Later you can point your existing AP mailbox at your intake address so vendors who have never heard of inletAP keep working — that is email forwarding.
Watch it arrive
Open Inbox. The document is queued as soon as the upload or the mail is accepted, and moves through its states as the pipeline works. A short text invoice is usually quick; a large scanned PDF takes longer. We do not promise a processing time.
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
parsed | Attachments and body text extracted from the MIME. Shown as New. |
extracted | Fields read from the document, each with a confidence score. Shown as New. |
needs_review | Something wants a human. See the next step. |
ready_for_approval | Confident enough, and coded. Shown as Awaiting approval. |
The inbox badge uses a shorter vocabulary than the underlying status: everything before review reads as "New". See invoice statuses for the full list.
Check it worked: your invoice is in the Inbox list under the vendor's name. If it is not there a minute later, why hasn't my invoice appeared? works through the reasons in the order they usually turn out to be the answer.
Send the same invoice twice by email and you get two documents. The exact same email delivered twice is collapsed at the door, but a re-forward from another mailbox is a new document. inletAP compares it against your existing invoices after extraction and raises a card on the newer one; marking it a duplicate is your decision, not ours. See duplicate detection.
3. Review what it read
Open the document from the Inbox list — anything the system wants a person to check is also gathered in Review Queue. You will see the extracted fields next to the original, each with its own confidence score.
A document-level score is also computed — the lowest of the four required fields, and never higher than the model's own overall figure — and that is the number the 0.7 review threshold is applied to.
This is deliberate. "This invoice is 82% correct" is not an actionable statement. "The total is certain and the invoice number is a guess" tells you exactly where to look, which is the only useful form the information can take.
Anything scoring below the review threshold routes to a human, and so does a file a quarantine rule caught — that decision outranks the extractor entirely. Lines that do not add up to the stated total are shown on the document screen with the variance, and they stop the bill at export rather than at review: your ledger is never sent a total the lines do not support.
Correct anything that needs correcting. Every edit is recorded with your name against it, which sounds ominous but is only how the audit trail works.
4. Code it to a property
Set the property, the GL account and the cost center. Entity and class are not typed here: the entity comes from the property's building record, and the class is resolved at export from your property-to-class mapping.
These are fields on the document, not attributes welded to the vendor, so an invoice covering three buildings can be split across three buildings — evenly, by unit count, by square footage, by percent or by typed amounts. See splitting an invoice. The plumber who works on your entire portfolio does not have to be three separate vendors to make the coding work.
You are doing this by hand exactly once. In the next guide you turn this decision into a rule and never make it again.
If your buildings and vendors are not in inletAP yet, you can type them as you go — or load them all at once from a spreadsheet you export from your existing system. That is importing your data, and it is a separate job from this fifteen minutes.
5. Approve it
On the document, choose an Approver and press Send to approval. The invoice moves to Approvals, where the approver — possibly you — signs for it.
On the Free plan every invoice takes that one approval. From the Starter plan, approval tiers band it by amount: a tier has a floor, an SLA in hours, and a number of approvers required, so "anything over five thousand needs two people and a decision within a day" is a thing you can express directly rather than approximate with a shared mailbox and hope.
6. Export it
Connect your ledger under Settings → Connectors — QuickBooks Online and Xero both live there, and connecting one is an Admin action. Then open Exports and run the batch; that is an Admin or Controller Approver action. The bill is created against the vendor and account you coded, and the document records the external ID it came back with, so you can always answer the question "where did this end up".
Check it worked: the batch is listed on Exports with your invoice in it, and the document itself now shows the id your ledger gave the bill. Open that bill in QuickBooks or Xero if you want the other half of the proof.
Those are the two direct connectors — see connecting Xero and connecting QuickBooks. On any other ledger, export produces a CSV instead. The columns are yours to define — seven sensible defaults out of the box, up to 64 columns, at document or allocation granularity — so you can shape it to whatever your system's import expects. There is no per-vendor preset and no connector for AppFolio, Buildium, Yardi or Rent Manager: you map the columns once. That last sentence is about sending bills out. Loading your buildings and vendors in at setup is a different job with its own page — see importing your data.
What just happened
You ran the whole pipeline: intake, parse, extract, review, code, approve, export. One real invoice is now a coded, approved bill in your ledger, and you should be looking at an export batch that names it.
Every stage recorded who did what and when, and whether it was a person or the system. Where a rule made the decision, the rule is named in the event. Open Audit Log and read the entries for that invoice back: parsed, extracted, the fields you corrected with their previous values, the approval, the export. That list is the fifteen minutes you just spent, written down by the product rather than by you.
Nothing you did was configuration. That is the intended shape of the product — you start by processing invoices, and the setup accumulates behind you as a by-product of decisions you were making anyway.
Where to go next
- What you can send — the file types, the size ceiling, and which of the three doors to use.
- Importing your data — load your properties, units, vendors and entities from a spreadsheet instead of typing them.
- Forwarding your existing mailbox — so vendors who have never heard of you keep working.
- Your first coding rule — stop making the same coding decision twice.
- Approval tiers — encode who is allowed to approve what.
- Why hasn't my invoice appeared? — for when step 2 disappoints you.