QuickBooks Online

AP automation for QuickBooks Online, built for property portfolios

QuickBooks Online is where a great many small and mid-sized management companies actually keep the books — usually with class carrying the property. What it does not do is read the invoice out of your mailbox and work out which class it belongs to. That is the gap InletAP fills.

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.

What QuickBooks does well, and where the manual work still is

QuickBooks is a perfectly good ledger for a property portfolio. It is not, and does not claim to be, an invoice intake system.

The standard property management setup on QuickBooks Online uses classes for properties and the chart of accounts for expense categories, which works well enough that a lot of companies never outgrow it. Everything downstream of the bill — reporting by class, owner statements, reconciliation — is fine.

The manual work sits upstream. Someone opens the AP mailbox, downloads the attachment, reads the vendor, number, date and total off it, decides which building it belongs to and therefore which class, decides the expense account, keys all of that into QuickBooks, and then chases whoever has to approve it. Repeat several hundred times a month. QuickBooks has no view into any of that, because none of it happens inside QuickBooks.

InletAP takes that whole span. Vendors email invoices to an address on your own subdomain; the fields are extracted with per-field confidence; your rules set the property, class and GL account; approval follows your thresholds; and the approved bill posts into QuickBooks Online with the class already correct. What you had to type before is what you now only have to check when the system flags it.

Because the coding happens before export rather than after, the bill arrives in QuickBooks finished. The alternative pattern — dump everything in and fix the classes in QuickBooks afterwards — is where most of the reconciliation pain in property AP comes from.

Capabilities

The QuickBooks workflow, end to end

Connect the company

Authorize your QuickBooks Online company from integrations settings and map classes and GL accounts. Connection state and last sync time are visible in the app.

Classes are per line, so one bill carries five properties

Coding rules set the QuickBooks class from the property and the GL account from the expense category. Because the class lives on the line and not on the header, one invoice covering five buildings posts as one bill with five correctly classified lines — split by amount, percent, even share, unit count or square footage, and balanced to the cent.

Posts as bills — one per company

Approved invoices become QuickBooks bills with vendor, class and GL account set, and the returned external ID is stored against the document. A bill belongs to one company file, so an invoice whose properties keep separate books fans out into one bill per connected company, each linked back to the same original email.

Idempotent retries

A failed batch names the cause — inactive account, missing vendor — and retries safely. External IDs mean a retry cannot create a duplicate bill.

Approval before posting

Nothing reaches QuickBooks until it has cleared your approval tiers, so the ledger contains authorized spend rather than a queue of drafts.

CSV for the rest

Owner-specific books that sit outside your main QuickBooks file are handled by the configurable CSV export, available on every plan.

Why this one

Why not just use the QuickBooks receipt capture inbox

QuickBooks Online can already accept documents by email. It is worth being precise about where that stops being enough.
  • It captures a document; it does not route an approval to the property manager responsible for that building.
  • It cannot split one invoice across five property classes, and it certainly cannot split one across two QuickBooks companies.
  • There is no per-field confidence, so you cannot tell which extractions need checking.
  • There is no rules engine to apply property, class and GL defaults by vendor or source email.
  • There is no separate intake address per property, so coding starts from zero on every document.
  • There is no approval policy, SLA timer or escalation on low confidence.
  • There is no audit trail with before/after values on the coding decisions.
  • Duplicate detection across re-sent and forwarded invoices is not part of it.

Pricing

QuickBooks Online sync is in the free plan

The direct QuickBooks connector is not an upsell. It is on every plan, including the free one — 25 invoices a month, no credit card, bills posting into your QuickBooks company. Gating the part that removes the data entry would only mean you never got to see whether it works. Paid plans start at $39 a month for 150 invoices and add the rules engine and approval tiers, and every plan has unlimited users, so the property managers who approve the bills cost nothing.

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.

See all plans

QuickBooks AP automation — common questions

Keep reading

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.