Security & audit

Controls your auditor will recognize, described without marketing language

AP is where a small company's control weaknesses show up first: one person who can both code and approve, a duplicate nobody caught, an approval that lives in an email thread. This page sets out what InletAP enforces — and, at the bottom, what it does not yet have, because a security page that only lists strengths is not useful to you.

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.

Controls

What the product enforces

Append-only audit log

Actor, timestamp, source (user, system or rule) and before/after values on every change. No role has an edit or delete path, so the record does not depend on trust.

Separation of duties

Role-based access splits editing extracted fields from approving spend, and from managing rules, integrations and users. The person who corrects a total is not automatically the one who authorizes it.

Threshold-based approval

Amount tiers set how many approvals an invoice requires. Low extraction confidence escalates an invoice regardless of amount, which closes the obvious gap where a misread total lands under a threshold.

Duplicate detection at ingest

Message ID, attachment fingerprint, and a vendor / invoice-number / date / amount heuristic — applied before a document reaches a queue, which is the cheapest place to catch a double payment.

Quarantine as a policy hold

Rules can stop a document in place — unrecognized sender, unacceptable attachment type — rather than letting it into the coding pipeline. Quarantined items are a saved view, not a silent drop.

Tenant isolation and encryption

Scoping applied at the query layer rather than in the UI, TLS in transit, encryption at rest with per-environment keys for object storage, and our own inbound mail infrastructure rather than a third-party relay. Data is stored in AWS US East (Ohio); InletAP is operated from Toronto, Canada.

Roles

Who can do what

The baseline matrix. Thresholds and per-property approvers layer on top of it.
Approval rights are further constrained by amount tiers and per-property approvers.
 AP specialistControllerAdmin
View documentsYesYesYes
Edit extracted fieldsYesYesYes
Send for approvalYesYesYes
Approve at standard thresholdYesYes
Override policyYesYes
Manage rulesYesYes
Manage integrationsYes
Manage users and rolesYes

Approval rights are further constrained by amount tiers and per-property approvers.

Document lifecycle

Every document is in exactly one named state

Status is not a label someone applies — it is the position in the pipeline, and every transition is logged.

new

Accepted over SMTP, pending parse.

parsed

MIME parsed, attachments indexed.

needs_review

Confidence below threshold, or a policy exception.

ready_for_approval

Complete and policy-valid.

approved

Approval chain complete, irreversibly.

exported

Posted to the target system with an external ID.

failed_export

Export attempt failed, with the reason recorded.

duplicate

Matched an existing invoice or document.

quarantined

Held by a security or policy rule.

filtered

Not an invoice. Kept, searchable, restorable, never billed.

Reliability

The failure modes that matter for AP

An AP pipeline that silently drops a document is worse than one that is slow. These are the guarantees on that.
  • No silent drops — unrecoverable failures land in a dead-letter queue rather than disappearing.
  • Idempotent pipelines: a retried job cannot produce a second bill or a second document.
  • Retry-safe SMTP semantics — a transient backend failure returns a temporary failure so the sender retries, instead of accepting mail we cannot process.
  • Export batches record external IDs, so a retry updates rather than duplicates.
  • Structured logs, traces and metrics on each pipeline stage, so a stall is visible rather than inferred.

What InletAP does not have yet

InletAP is an early product and does not currently hold third-party security certifications such as SOC 2. We are not going to phrase that as "SOC 2 ready" or put a badge on it that implies otherwise. If your procurement process requires an audit report, that is a genuine reason not to buy yet, and we would rather you knew now.

What we will do: complete any security questionnaire honestly, tell you exactly which controls are implemented versus planned, and put commitments in writing. support@inlet-ap.com.

Reporting a vulnerability

Send it to security@inlet-ap.com. That address reaches the operator directly rather than a ticket queue. We acknowledge a report within one business day, give you a first triage and severity decision within three, and update you at least every seven days until the issue is closed.

There is no paid bug bounty, no PGP key and no 24/7 hotline today — InletAP is run by one person in one time zone, and a report that arrives on a Friday evening may not be read until Monday. We would rather you knew that before you spend the weekend writing it up.

Security questions

See also the privacy policy and the terms.

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.