Every bill gets a second look — starting with your first invoice
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.
- Invoice no.
- BFS-4471
- Service
- Annual sprinkler inspection
- Amount due
- $2,480.00
This looks like the same bill as BFS-4471, approved on 20 Aug.
- Already received
- $2,480.00
- checked against every invoice from this vendor
- This one
- $2,480.00
Both are from Beacon Fire & Safety for $2,480.00. The attached file is identical.
This is held back from export until you decide. The vendor is not contacted.
The control a small firm has never been able to afford
A second pair of eyes on every bill is a staffing problem. A five-property firm cannot fund two people who both remember what that vendor charged last spring, so the check does not happen.
Billing errors run for months
In ACFE's 2026 Report to the Nations, billing schemes were 21% of all cases studied, with a median loss of $90,000. They ran a median of 14 months before anyone noticed.
Duplicates: a range, not a number
Published estimates put duplicate payments at between 0.1% and 2% of payments. The studies differ by up to twentyfold, and quoting the flattering end would be a sales tactic rather than a fact.
Monitoring shortens the gap
Automated monitoring was the first thing to surface only 2% of cases. But proactive data monitoring meant 53% lower median losses and 44% faster detection (ACFE, 2026, figures 28–29).
Not “we catch it”
That is not the claim. We make the gap between the first odd invoice and somebody noticing it a week instead of a year, and we leave a record that the check happened.
The record is half the value
Every finding, acceptance and dispute is written to the audit trail with a person and a timestamp. When an owner asks why grounds care went up 10%, the answer is a document rather than a recollection.
It does not hold your bills
A finding does not hold the bill and does not contact the vendor. One thing in the product blocks anything at all: a top-tier duplicate cannot be exported until a person decides.
The rest of the reasoning: small firms, restraint, quiet weeks, and the number we never show
The numbers are unflattering and they are not ours. Billing schemes, in the ACFE study, are invoices for things that were never delivered, or inflated ones. People and tip-offs surface far more cases than software does; what monitoring does is shorten the 14 months and shrink what the 14 months cost.
Small firms are hit hardest: billing schemes were 28% of cases at organizations under 100 employees, against 18% at larger ones, because a small organization is the one without a second reviewer.
The restraint comes from the same benchmarks. Ardent Partners, in its State of ePayables 2025, puts the average cost of processing one invoice at $9.84 and the average exception rate at 18.4%. A tool that adds a second pile of exceptions on top of that has made the job worse and will be switched off by the second month. So every price check carries a dollar floor and a minimum history, at most two findings show on one invoice, and a check you keep rejecting mutes itself.
The record is the half a property manager gets asked for: an owner asking why a cost went up at their building, or a board asking what controls the management company runs on its payables, is asking for evidence. The weekly summary goes out in quiet weeks too — “34 bills checked, nothing needed a second look” — because for somebody who opens the app twice a week, silence and breakage look identical.
None of this is a judgment about a vendor. Every headline is a factual comparison in your own numbers, and there is no score, no band and no rating attached to anybody. We compute one internally to decide whether a finding is worth showing you; showing it to you would replace a fact you can check with a number you cannot.
Capabilities
What is checked on every invoice
From your first day
Possible duplicate
Nine matching rules, and six guards
Just under an approval threshold
Within 5% below, more than once in 90 days
One job, several invoices
Each under the threshold, together over it
First invoice from this vendor
A note, not a warning
Once there is history
Exactly-billed contract changed
Needs 3 invoices
Higher than usual
Needs 5 invoices
Looks like a rate change
Needs 5 invoices
Never seen this high
Needs 9 invoices
The numbers each check ships with
- Duplicates, from the first invoice. Every arriving bill is compared against the invoices you already hold from that vendor — up to 200 of them, going back two years: the same attachment, the same number and amount, a mis-keyed digit, a transposition, the same figure billed twice inside a month. Nine rules, six guards that stop an ordinary monthly bill being called a copy, and a top-tier match that cannot leave for your ledger until a person decides.
- A fixed contract that moved. A vendor that has billed the identical amount every month is on a contract, so any movement over $25 or 1% is a fact worth one line — after three invoices. This is the highest-precision check in the product and it produces the plainest sentence: $1,450.00 every month since March, $1,595.00 this month.
- A price increase, confirmed rather than guessed. An invoice at least 10% and at least $50 above the usual amount is noted quietly. It becomes a finding only when a second invoice does the same against a frozen baseline, because one high bill is an event and two is a new price. Then it re-baselines and reports once, rather than repeating itself for six months. The 10% is one box in Settings if 10 is wrong for you — any whole number from 1 to 100, for the whole workspace. The $50 floor is not adjustable.
- Invoices shaped to fit under your approvals. A bill landing within 5% under a threshold that would have sent it to an approver, with another from the same vendor doing the same inside 90 days. And two or more invoices from one vendor for one property inside seven days, each under the threshold, adding up to more than it. Both use the approval tiers you already configured.
- Bank details that changed. When the bank details or the payment address printed on an invoice differ from the vendor's earlier invoices, the card shows both side by side, with bank numbers cut to their last four digits, and suggests checking the change with the vendor on a phone number you already have, not one in the email. It is a warning: it holds nothing. A changed postal address alone is a note.
- History it states out loud. Every baseline names its own sample on the card — “last 9 invoices, Nov–Jul” — and the invoices it was built from are links you can open. That one phrase is the evidence, the explanation, and the reason your first invoice from a vendor was never flagged.
- Two verbs, no modal, and an undo. That's fine, or Look into it. Both are decisions and both are recorded; there is no neutral dismiss to click by reflex. Accepting tells you in words what it learned and lets you change it on the spot. It works on a phone: the card is hoisted above the document, and both buttons are large enough to hit.
Why this one
What is genuinely different, and what is not
- We publish the defaults instead of asking you to invent them: at least 10% and at least $50 for an increase, and any move over $25 or 1% on an exactly-billed contract.
- The other two are published as well: $250 above a previous maximum, and about five invoices before a price can be compared at all.
- The floor is published too. We do not flag increases under $50. An unstated floor makes a miss look like a bug; a stated one makes it a decision you can argue with.
- History is kept per vendor and property, never per vendor. The same landscaper is on a fixed contract at one building and time-and-materials at another, and comparing across the two is how a price check turns into noise.
- Amounts that move for real reasons are not price-checked. Utility, waste and telecom bills, and any vendor whose amounts have never been steady, get duplicate and threshold checks only. A gas bill is not told it went up in January.
- No score, no band, no percentile, no rating on a vendor. Competitors ship a scale — Ottimate's Trust Score, Ramp's Below/Typical/Above market. A comparison between two dollar amounts needs no legend.
- Only a top-tier duplicate can block anything. Everything else informs, and nothing is ever emailed to a vendor.
- No contract upload, no reading a rate out of a signed agreement, and no check against an inflation index. Those are the obvious next steps and they are not in the product today.
- No weather normalization, so no honest utility price alerting. A heating bill that rises 30% in a cold January has not gone up in price, and we would rather run no check than a wrong one.
- No comparison against other inletAP customers. We do not have the volume, the data rights or the appetite for the re-identification risk that comes with small samples.
Who else ships price alerting, and what is different here
Price alerting on invoices is not new. It is table stakes in restaurant AP — Ottimate, Craftable, MarginEdge and Restaurant365 all ship it — and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Two things are different here. In property-management AP the capability exists only inside Yardi and RealPage, enterprise suites with no published price. And nobody ships a working default: MarginEdge says outright that “defining ‘unexpected’ costs is up to you”, Ottimate needs a purchase order, cost file or contract to compare against, and the only published default anywhere in the market is Craftable's 20% promo threshold, set per store. Nobody sells “your landscaper just went up 14%” to a five-property manager on QuickBooks Online.
Compare
Who else checks a bill against the vendor's history
| inletAP | Yardi / RealPage | Restaurant AP (Ottimate, Craftable, MarginEdge, R365) | Mid-market AP (Stampli, Tipalti, BILL) | SMB property tools (Buildium, DoorLoop, TenantCloud) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Duplicate detection | Yes — after extraction, on every edit, and a top-tier match is held out of the export | Inside the suite | Yes | Yes — the strongest published duplicate story in the market | Nothing published |
| Price-change alerting | Yes, on the vendor's own history for that property | Yes — Yardi Service Contract Manager, RealPage Spend Management | Yes — this is where the category was invented | Anomaly language in marketing; no published price-variance rules | Nothing published |
| Works with nothing configured | Yes — no threshold, no cost file, no reference document | Enterprise implementation | No — MarginEdge: “defining ‘unexpected’ costs is up to you”; Ottimate needs a PO, cost file or contract | Duplicates yes; price no | — |
| Published default threshold | 10% and $50, printed on the page — and the 10% is a box you can change | None published | Only Craftable — a 20% promo threshold, set per store | None published | — |
| Shows you a score or a band | Never — the comparison is two dollar amounts | Not published | Varies | Ottimate ships a Trust Score; Ramp labels line items Below / Typical / Above market | — |
| Published price | Yes — free plan upward, checks included | None public, enterprise | Published per location | Mostly quote-based | Published, and the capability is absent |
Competitor rows checked 2026-08-31 against vendor help centers, product pages and pricing pages. “Nothing published” means we could not find the capability documented publicly, which is not the same as proving it does not exist — several of these vendors document very little. The two property-management suites that clearly have the capability, Yardi and RealPage, publish no price at all.
Pricing
Included on every plan, including the free one
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.
Second Look — common questions
Does this accuse my vendor of anything?
Does it stop my bills?
What if I have no contracts on file?
How long before it starts working?
Does it cost extra?
How many alerts will I actually get?
What is the catch rate?
Can I turn it off for a vendor who is genuinely getting more expensive?
Who sees a finding?
Keep reading
Point it at the vendor you have the longest history with
Forward a few months of one vendor's invoices to your intake address and see what the comparison says. The free plan covers 25 invoices every month, with no credit card, and the checks are on from the first document.