How do vendors know where to send invoices?

You tell them, the same way you told them the current 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. Forward it to the mailbox that should handle it and the routing follows that mailbox.

Why can't InletAP just receive mail sent to invoices@mycompany.com?

Because the routing for a domain you own is controlled by your DNS and your mail provider, not by us. No third party can intercept it. What InletAP can do is receive mail on the domains it controls — your organization's *.inlet-ap.com subdomain. Point an auto-forward at one of those mailboxes and an address you already publish keeps working, with the destination mailbox deciding where the invoice goes.

What formats can it read?

PDFs, scans and photographs, common Office documents, and invoices typed into the body of an email with no attachment at all. Attachments are parsed out of the MIME structure on the server, so nobody downloads and re-uploads anything.

What does 'confidence' mean in practice?

Each extracted field carries its own score rather than the document carrying one. You set the threshold below which a document is sent to a human. Some conditions bypass the score entirely and always route to review: an unmapped vendor, a rule that quarantined the file, or line items that do not sum to the stated total.

Can a rule approve an invoice without a person seeing it?

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

What happens if extraction gets something wrong?

You correct it on the review screen and the edit is tracked against what the model proposed. Repeated corrections for the same vendor are the signal to add a mapping rule, which is usually a one-off fix rather than an ongoing cost.

How it works

An invoice arrives as email. It leaves as a coded, approved bill.

Six stages, and the useful one is the fourth: a person only sees a document when the system is not confident enough to proceed without them. Everything here describes what the product does today, not what is planned.

Start free See pricing

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.

Stage by stage

What happens at each step

Each stage below lists what it does — and, where it matters, what it deliberately does not.

01
Vendors email the invoice
Every organization gets its own intake domain. Hand the address to your vendors, or auto-forward from the mailbox you already use — the invoice arrives as email, exactly as it does today.
- One catch-all address plus per-property mailboxes
- PDF, scan, image and Office attachments, and invoices in the email body
- Duplicate detection on message ID, attachment fingerprint and vendor/number/date/amount
- Auto-forward an existing address to a per-property mailbox and routing follows the mailbox
02
Fields come out with a confidence score
Vendor, invoice number, dates, totals, tax and line items are extracted per field — each one carrying a confidence score and the evidence it came from.
- Per-field confidence, not one score for the whole document
- “Why this value?” shows the text the model read
- Line-item totals are checked against the stated total and the variance is flagged
- Anything the model is unsure about is routed to a human instead of guessed at
03
Rules code it to the property and GL account
Map a source email to a vendor, a vendor to a default GL account and property, and an amount threshold to an approver. Simulate a rule against the last 500 documents before you turn it on. Where one invoice covers several buildings, it is split here rather than retyped into a spreadsheet.
- Conditions on vendor, amount, property, sender and confidence
- Actions set coding, assign an approver, auto-approve or quarantine
- Rules run in priority order and every match is explained on the document
- Simulate is read-only — nothing is routed while you test
- One invoice splits across several properties by amount, percent, even share, unit count or square feet, and the split saves as a reusable template
04
A human sees only the exceptions
Clean documents move straight to approval. The review screen puts the original invoice next to the editable fields, so a correction is a glance and two keystrokes rather than re-keying the invoice.
- Split-pane: rendered document on the left, editable fields on the right
- Edits are tracked against what the model proposed
- Keyboard-driven: J/K to move, Enter to open, A to send for approval
- Mark duplicate, request info from the vendor, or send straight to approval
05
Approvals follow written policy
Thresholds decide who signs off. Approvers see why an invoice reached them, batch-approve what is routine, and every decision is written to the audit log with the comment attached.
- Amount tiers, per-property approvers and escalation on low confidence
- SLA timers with overdue alerts that escalate to the controller
- Batch approve, with a comment required on rejection
- Approvals are irreversible and attributable
06
Approved bills post to your ledger
Approved invoices post to the books you already keep — QuickBooks Online through a direct connector, or a mapped CSV for Xero, AppFolio, Buildium, Yardi, Rent Manager and owner-specific ledgers. Failed batches say what broke and retry without duplicating.
- QuickBooks Online bills with vendor, property class and GL account
- A split invoice whose properties keep separate books posts as one bill per company, and the export preview says how many before you press it
- Mapped CSV that Xero, AppFolio, Buildium, Yardi and Rent Manager can import
- External IDs recorded so a batch can be reconciled back to the document
- Retries are idempotent — a retry cannot double-post

The honest part

What InletAP cannot do, stated up front

Three limits worth knowing before you evaluate anything, because finding them out in week three is worse.

It cannot receive mail on your own domain

Mail addressed to a domain you own is routed by your DNS and mail provider. InletAP receives on domains it controls. Bringing in an address you already publish means setting up auto-forwarding at your provider — which takes a few minutes and is supported by Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 and everything else — aimed at the InletAP mailbox that should handle that mail.

It does not move money

There are no ACH or check disbursement rails. InletAP produces approved, coded bills in your ledger; payment continues to run wherever it runs today. That is a scope decision, not an omission — the inbound half of AP is the part property tools do badly, and it is the part we are solving.

Extraction is not perfect on every vendor

Long-tail vendor layouts are genuinely hard. The design response is not to claim otherwise — it is per-field confidence, a review queue that catches what is uncertain, and vendor mapping rules that turn a recurring correction into a one-time fix.

The review screen

Where the human time actually goes

If a document reaches a person, the goal is that the correction takes seconds. That means the original and the fields have to be on screen together, and the uncertain field has to be obvious.

A typical review is a vendor mapped at 68%, a due date read at 50%, tax at 40% and a line-item total that is $144.65 short of the stated one — all four visible without opening anything. What the screen gives you:

Rendered document on the left with zoom and page navigation.
Editable fields on the right, grouped into vendor, header, amounts and coding.
A confidence chip on every field that has one.
“Why this value?” shows the text the value was read from.
Line-item totals checked against the stated total, with the variance named.
Edits tracked against what the model proposed, so corrections are visible.
Sticky action bar: save, mark duplicate, request info, send to approval, approve.
Keyboard flow that survives a queue of forty documents.

When one invoice covers five buildings

Splitting happens on the document, not in a spreadsheet

The landscaper bills five properties on one PDF. Coding it to one building would be wrong and coding it by hand is what the spreadsheet is for, so the split is part of the pipeline — computed at stage 03, carried through approval, and settled at stage 06.

Properties named in the invoice text are matched against your property aliases and proposed as pre-filled rows, each with the exact text it was read from.
The split is computed by amount, percentage, even share, unit count or square footage, and nothing saves until the remaining amount is exactly $0.00.
The odd cent from a three-way split is given to a specific row by largest remainder and marked, rather than dropped or spread.
The split saves as a named template, optionally tied to that vendor, so next month is one action.
An approval can be scoped to one property's share, so a property manager signs for their own building.
At export, properties that keep separate books produce one QuickBooks bill per company, and the preview says how many before you press it.

How splitting works in detail — the five bases, the rounding rule, and the one QuickBooks setup where none of this is possible.

PricingPublished plans from free to $249/mo, unlimited users, per-invoice overage rates.IntegrationsYour ledger, your PMS by CSV, and how email intake is set up.Security & auditAccess control, the audit trail, and how documents are handled.

How it works — common questions

Still deciding whether this fits your portfolio? The controller's view covers coding consistency and close; the principal's view covers cost and controls.

Start free and run your own invoices through it

25 processed invoices a month, unlimited users, no credit card. Point a few vendors at your intake address and see the extraction, the coding and the audit trail on your own documents.

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