FAQ
Questions people actually ask before buying
Including the ones with an answer that does not help us. If something here rules inletAP out for you, that is a better outcome than finding out in week three.
If you would rather test than read, email one of your own invoices to the Invoice Inbox Test and read the fields it returns, with a confidence score on each one. No account and no card.
The product
What is inletAP?
Accounts payable automation for property management companies that checks every bill, not just captures it. inletAP extracts invoice fields with a per-field confidence score, matches the invoice to a property, sets the GL account by your rules, and routes it for approval — then compares it against what that vendor billed for that property before, against your own approval thresholds, and against every invoice you already hold from them, and tells you what it found. Approved bills post to your ledger: QuickBooks Online and Xero through direct connectors, or a CSV whose columns you define yourself. The price is published, every plan carries unlimited users, and the free plan takes 25 documents every month. Documents arrive however they already do — a vendor-facing address on your own intake domain, auto-forwarding, or upload.
Does it replace my property management system or my ledger?
No, and it is designed not to. inletAP is not a PMS and not a general ledger. It automates the inbound invoice workflow in front of whatever you already run and hands it finished, coded, approved bills.
Who is it for?
Property management companies where vendor invoices arrive by email and have to be coded to a building and approved by someone who is not in accounting. In practice that means AP specialists, controllers, property managers who approve spend on their buildings, and the principal who is accountable for the controls.
Does inletAP match invoices to purchase orders?
Yes. 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. A purchase order can also be a work order, a quote or a contract. It is on every plan, including Free, and it does nothing until you add your first purchase order. It does not check goods or work received.
What is it not for?
Businesses that need bill payment rails, a check of invoices against goods received in a procurement system, or a native connector into a property management system. inletAP has none of those today.
Email intake and setup
How long does setup take?
Signing up creates the workspace and issues your first intake mailbox in the same session, so you can forward a real vendor invoice immediately. There is no implementation project, no professional services engagement and no setup fee. Vendor mappings, coding defaults and approval tiers are added as you go rather than configured before you can start.
Can inletAP receive mail sent to my own company domain?
No, and neither can any other vendor. Routing for a domain you own is governed by your DNS and mail provider. inletAP receives mail on domains it controls — your organization's subdomain of inlet-ap.com. To bring in an address you already publish, set up auto-forwarding at your own provider into the inletAP mailbox that should handle it. The destination mailbox decides the routing, so a per-property address can forward to that property's mailbox.
How do I get vendors to use the new address?
Most companies do it in two waves: put the inletAP address on new purchase orders and vendor onboarding, and auto-forward the existing shared mailbox so nothing is missed while vendors update their records. Both paths land in an inletAP mailbox, so both route correctly from day one.
Can I import my properties and vendors?
Yes — properties, units, vendors and ownership entities, from a file you export from whatever you run today. It is a one-time setup upload, not a connection: inletAP reads the file you produce, nothing is fetched from your property management system and nothing is sent back to it. Download our spreadsheet template, or bring your own export and tell us once which of your columns is which — sample values from your own file are shown beside each choice, because every report-builder export names its columns differently. The preview writes nothing: it lists every row with what it would do, and for a record you already have, which fields change, old value beside new. Rows that match two existing records are reported rather than guessed at. Then you import, and because it matches on the same keys every time, running the same file again updates rather than duplicates. Up to 5,000 rows a file. DoorLoop, Rentec Direct and TenantCloud templates are recognized on sight; everything else works through the generic template and the mapping step.
Can each property have its own address?
Yes. Alongside a portfolio catch-all you can create a mailbox per property, entity or joint venture, each routing to that property by default, each showing how many messages it has received and when the last one arrived.
Extraction, coding and rules
What file formats can it read?
PDFs, photos and images of paper invoices, common Office documents, and invoices typed into the body of an email with no attachment. Attachments are parsed out of the MIME structure server-side.
How accurate is the extraction?
Accurate enough to be useful, imperfect on long-tail vendor layouts, and — more importantly — explicit about where it is unsure. Confidence is scored per field rather than per document, and any document whose vendor, number, date or total scores below 70% routes to a human, as does a file we could not read and an invoice that names no single property. A quarantine rule holds a file in its own state. An unmapped vendor or a line-item total that does not match the stated total is caught at export, where the bill is parked rather than posted.
Does it catch duplicate invoices?
Yes. A re-sent copy of the same email never gets in at all — the mail server refuses a second delivery of the same message. Right after extraction, every document is compared against every invoice you already hold from that vendor, on nine matching rules with six guards — the guards are what stop an ordinary monthly bill at a steady price, a progress draw or a vendor statement being reported as a copy. A confirmed duplicate then holds that invoice out of every export until a person decides: it stays approved and leaves in the next run the moment somebody answers the card, and the other invoices in the run are unaffected. That hold is the only thing in the product that blocks anything.
Do you tell me when a vendor puts their price up?
Yes, once there is enough history to compare with. Each vendor's amounts are tracked per property, because the same landscaper can be on a fixed contract at one building and time-and-materials at another. An invoice at least 10% and at least $50 above the usual amount is noted, and becomes a finding when a second invoice confirms it — one high bill is an event, two is a new price. A vendor that has billed an identical amount every month is treated as a contract, where any move over $25 or 1% is worth one line. It needs about five invoices from a vendor for a property first, and says so on the card. Bills that move for real reasons — utilities, waste, telecom, and any vendor whose amounts have never been steady — are not price-checked at all. Nothing is held and nothing is sent to the vendor.
Can one invoice be split across several properties?
Yes, and it is a first-class feature rather than a side effect of the coding fields. Property, unit, ownership entity, GL account and cost center are fields on the document rather than attributes fixed to the vendor, and the class is resolved from the property at export, and on top of that a split is computed by amount, by percentage, evenly, by unit count or by square footage; the money is held in integer cents so the rows add to the invoice total exactly, with the odd cent from a split in three handed to a named row rather than dropped; properties named in the invoice text are proposed automatically with the text they were read from; the split saves as a reusable template tied to that vendor; and an approval can be scoped to one property's share.
Can you split one invoice across two QuickBooks companies?
Yes — as one bill per company. A QuickBooks bill is scoped to a single company file and there is no cross-company posting anywhere in the QuickBooks Online accounting API, so an invoice whose properties keep separate books becomes two bills, each carrying only that company's share and each traceable back to the same original email. The export preview names the companies and the amounts before you press Export. inletAP does not post intercompany due-to / due-from journals — consolidation is a general-ledger job and inletAP is not a general ledger.
What if my properties are QuickBooks locations rather than classes?
Then a bill can carry only one of your properties, and splitting is not possible for you without a change to your chart of accounts. A QuickBooks bill carries one Location for the whole document, and classes and customers on each line. So properties tracked as QuickBooks Locations cannot be split across a single bill at all — only properties tracked as classes can. inletAP checks which one your company uses and says so before the export runs, not after it. It is worth checking before you evaluate anything else on this page, because it is the one setup where the split-coding half of the product cannot help you.
Can rules approve invoices automatically?
Not through a rule. A rule's “auto-approve” action sends the document straight to the approval queue instead of the review queue, so a person still signs it. Genuine auto-approval is a per-property dollar threshold: set one on a building and that building's share of an invoice under it is signed off automatically when the invoice is sent for approval, recorded in the audit log with the system as the actor.
Pricing and plans
How much does it cost?
Free for 25 processed invoices a month, with no credit card and the QuickBooks Online and Xero connectors included. Then $39 for 150 invoices, $99 for 500, and $249 for 1,500. Every plan has unlimited users — approvers, property managers and your outside bookkeeper never appear on the bill. Extra invoices beyond the allowance are $0.35, $0.25 or $0.18 depending on the plan. Annual billing is two months free — you pay ten months instead of twelve. 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.
What counts as a processed invoice?
One invoice document that inletAP extracted fields from — per document, not per email. An email carrying three invoices counts as three; an email with no extractable invoice counts as none.
What happens if I exceed my plan?
On a paid plan, extra invoices are billed at the plan's overage rate and processing continues. The free plan is a hard cap: nothing is charged, and additional invoices are held rather than processed. Held invoices are not lost — they stay listed and are processed once you upgrade or the period rolls over.
Is there a contract or a minimum term?
No annual minimum and no implementation fee. Paid plans bill monthly or annually, and you can cancel at any time from billing settings — and change plan or billing interval there as well. Switching plan or billing interval is self-serve: the new plan starts immediately, and the difference is prorated onto your next invoice.
Security, data and scope
What does the audit trail record?
Every state change with actor, timestamp and source: field edits, rule matches, routing decisions, approvals, rejections with their comment, and successful exports, each carrying the value that was written. Status changes, allocation changes and role changes also carry the previous value. Failed and retried exports are recorded on the export batch rather than in the audit log. It is append-only — no role has an edit or delete path.
Do you have SOC 2?
No. inletAP is an early product and does not currently hold third-party security certifications, and we are not going to describe that as 'SOC 2 ready'. We will complete any security questionnaire honestly and tell you exactly which controls are implemented versus planned. If an audit report is a procurement requirement for you, that is a genuine reason not to buy yet.
How is my data separated from other customers'?
Tenant scoping is applied at the query layer so every read and write is bound to the requesting organization, rather than relying on the interface to filter. Multi-entity separation inside an organization is modeled explicitly, which is what keeps separate owner and joint-venture books apart.
Does inletAP move money?
No. There are no ACH or check disbursement rails. inletAP produces approved, coded bills in your ledger; payment continues to happen wherever it happens today. Approved bills land in QuickBooks Online or Xero for you to pay there, and on paid plans inletAP shows whether the ledger has marked each bill paid.
Not answered here?
Ask directly
Support has the contact routes. Questions about connectors and security requirements are particularly useful — they drive what gets built next.
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.