Question 1

What is InletAP?

Accepted Answer

Email-first accounts payable automation for property management companies. Your organization gets its own intake domain; vendors email invoices to an address on it, or you auto-forward the mailbox you already use. InletAP parses the message and attachments, extracts invoice fields with a per-field confidence score, applies your rules to code the invoice to a property and GL account, routes it for approval, and posts the approved bill to your ledger — QuickBooks Online through a direct connector, or a mapped CSV that Xero, AppFolio, Buildium, Yardi and Rent Manager can import.

Question 2

Does it replace my property management system or my ledger?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 3

Who is it for?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 4

What is it not for?

Accepted Answer

Businesses that need bill payment rails, three-way purchase order matching against a procurement system, or a native connector into a property management system. InletAP has none of those today.

Question 5

How long does setup take?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 6

Can InletAP receive mail sent to my own company domain?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 7

How do I get vendors to use the new address?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 8

Can each property have its own address?

Accepted Answer

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 its own DNS verification state and message volume.

Question 9

What file formats can it read?

Accepted Answer

PDFs, scans, photographs, 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.

Question 10

How accurate is the extraction?

Accepted Answer

Accurate enough to be useful, imperfect on long-tail vendor layouts, and — more importantly — calibrated. Confidence is scored per field rather than per document, anything below your threshold routes to a human, and unmapped vendors, quarantined files and line-item totals that do not match the stated total always escalate regardless of score.

Question 11

Does it catch duplicate invoices?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in three places. At ingest, before a document reaches a queue, on message ID, attachment fingerprint, and a vendor / invoice-number / date / amount match. Again during review, 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. And once more immediately before the bill is exported, so a duplicate created after approval is still caught. A top-tier match cannot be exported until a person decides; nothing else in the product blocks anything.

Question 12

Do you tell me when a vendor puts their price up?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 13

Can one invoice be split across several properties?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and it is a first-class feature rather than a side effect of the coding fields. Property, unit, entity, GL account, class and cost center are fields on the document rather than attributes fixed to the vendor, 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 three-way split 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.

Question 14

Can you split one invoice across two QuickBooks companies?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 15

What if my properties are QuickBooks locations rather than classes?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 16

Can rules approve invoices automatically?

Accepted Answer

If you write a rule that does. Auto-approval on small, high-confidence invoices from a mapped vendor is a common first rule. It is opt-in, bounded by whatever conditions you set, and every auto-approval is recorded in the audit log with the rule that caused it.

Question 17

How much does it cost?

Accepted Answer

Free for 25 processed invoices a month, with no credit card and QuickBooks Online sync 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 saves 17%, which is two months free. 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.

Question 18

What counts as a processed invoice?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 19

What happens if I exceed my plan?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 20

Is there a contract or a minimum term?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 21

What does the audit trail record?

Accepted Answer

Every state change with actor, timestamp, source (user, system or rule) and before/after values: field edits, rule matches, routing decisions, approvals, rejections with their comment, export attempts and retries. It is append-only — no role has an edit or delete path.

Question 22

Do you have SOC 2?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 23

How is my data separated from other customers'?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 24

Does InletAP move money?

Accepted Answer

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.

Questions people actually ask before buying

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Email intake and setup

Extraction, coding and rules

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Security, data and scope

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