Forwarding Documents by Email
Every workspace has its own email address. Forward an invoice or a receipt to it and it appears in the workspace within about a minute, with no logging in and no manual upload. It is the easiest way to capture the SaaS receipts and supplier invoices that already arrive in your inbox.
Forwarded email lands in Intake, the log of everything received at your workspace addresses. Reading and classifying the attachments takes longer than the minute: that is the email showing up, not the invoice being finished.
Your Address
Open Settings → Email ingestion, or Manage addresses → at the top of the Intake page. The Primary address is a copyable block that looks like this:
in-k7p2xq4m@in.aifinance.team
The part before the @ is eight random characters, not your company name. That is deliberate, and the next section explains why. The page also shows how many emails arrived in the last 30 days and when the last one was.
The address is per workspace, not per company or per person, and it cannot be renamed, changed or regenerated.
Who can send to it
Anyone who knows the address. There is no list of permitted senders. An email is turned away only when its sending domain explicitly fails its own authentication (SPF or DKIM), which points to a forged sender. An email whose domain gives no authentication result at all is accepted and marked Sender not verified. Authentication proves the mail came from that domain, not that the person is anyone in particular.
So the address is the secret. That is why it is eight random characters rather than your company name: nobody can guess it, and nobody can work out your other workspaces' addresses from one of them. Treat it the way you would treat a private upload link. Share it with the people and the billing systems that should be sending you documents, and not more widely.
Custom aliases
If a supplier's billing page needs a tidier address, you can claim up to five custom aliases per workspace, for example acme@in.aifinance.team. Under Custom aliases, type the name, click Claim, and use it anywhere the primary address works.
A custom alias is guessable, and that is the trade. Choosing your own company's name gives up the protection the random address provides. Worth it for a supplier portal that rejects odd-looking addresses, not worth it as your everyday address.
Retire switches an alias off, permanently. Mail to a retired alias is rejected rather than accepted, and the name is reserved for good: no other workspace can ever claim it, and neither can you. Retiring one does free a slot for a different name.
Claiming and retiring need the "Manage connections" permission, which accountant admins and finance leads hold by default. Everyone else sees the addresses read-only, which is all you need in order to forward.
What You Can Send
Accepted attachments: PDF, PNG, JPEG and WEBP, plus Excel, Word and CSV files (.xlsx, .xls, .csv, .docx, .doc). ZIP archives are opened and their supported contents ingested as separate documents. iPhone photos in HEIC format are not accepted by email (see below).
Excel, Word and CSV files are never read as invoices. They are kept as supporting documents, such as a timesheet sent with an invoice: see Invoices and their supporting documents below.
Everything else is not processed, and the email says so. A .txt attachment, for example, is not read: open the email and it is listed under the attachments that were not processed, with the reason. The count in the list is what was kept, not what was sent.
Limits: 10 MB per attachment, 20 attachments per email, 25 MB for the whole email, and 200 emails per workspace per day.
Two things that catch people out:
- An invoice pasted into the email body is lost. The body is stored and you can read it on the email, but it is never treated as a document. Only attachments are.
- Images under 10 KB are dropped as signatures and logos. A small screenshot of a receipt can disappear this way. Larger images embedded in the message are ingested like any attachment.
- A download link is not an attachment. Some invoicing services, such as Billingo, email a "download invoice" button instead of the PDF. That email shows Nothing to process. Download the invoice and forward it as an attachment, or upload it on the Documents page.
iPhone photos (HEIC) are not accepted by email. The email lists the photo as not processed, with the reason. Send it as JPEG or PDF, or upload it in the app instead: uploads convert iPhone photos to JPEG automatically.
Forwarding the same file twice costs nothing: the second copy is recognised by its contents, marked as a duplicate and never processed again.
What Happens Next
- The email arrives and a row appears in Intake.
- Each attachment is classified: invoice, receipt, credit note, bank statement, contract, supporting document, or something else.
- Invoices, receipts and credit notes go into extraction and appear on the Invoices page like any other upload. A shop or restaurant receipt that states VAT counts as a receipt here.
- Supporting documents (a performance certificate, a timesheet, a delivery note, a handover record, or a card-terminal slip that only proves a payment) are never turned into invoices. They become invoice attachments: see below.
- A bank statement is not extracted this way. It waits in Intake marked Awaiting extractor, and it appears in no queue and carries no badge, so nothing will remind you. Upload it on the Bank transactions page instead: see Uploading Bank Statements.
- A contract or anything unrecognised goes to the Documents page, which is accountant-side only. It does not appear under Needs review.
- Anything classified with low confidence is flagged under Needs review, whether or not it also went on to extraction.
One email, five destinations
- Invoice, receipt, credit noteRead and extracted like any upload.Invoices
- Supporting document, Excel or Word fileTimesheets, certificates, delivery notes, card-terminal slips. Linked to the invoice if the email holds exactly one; otherwise it waits under Unlinked attachments on Documents.Attachments
- Bank statementParked. No badge, no queue: upload it on Bank transactions.Awaiting extractor
- Contract, anything elseAccountant-side only. Not under Needs review.Documents
- Classified with low confidenceFlagged for a person, whether or not it also went to extraction.Needs review
Nothing is ever sent back to the sender, for success or failure.
Five destinations. The first two are the ones people expect; the third and fourth are where forwarded documents go quiet.
Nothing is ever sent back to the sender: no reply, no bounce, no confirmation, for success or failure. The only way to know an email arrived is to look at Intake.
The email itself is never billed to you as a document; only the attachments that become invoices count.
The app also learns from who sends what. Once a sender's domain has produced a few confident classifications, later documents from that domain are classified better, so the tenth invoice from a supplier lands more reliably than the first.
Invoices and their supporting documents
Suppliers often send an invoice together with its timesheet or certificate. What happens to the supporting documents depends on how many invoices the email carries:
- Exactly one invoice: the supporting documents are linked to it automatically and show Linked automatically on the invoice's Attachments tab.
- Several invoices: nothing is linked automatically. The supporting documents wait under the Unlinked attachments filter on the Documents page, with the invoices from the same email offered as suggestions.
- No invoice: the supporting documents wait there unlinked.
See Invoice Attachments.
The Intake Page
Intake has two tabs:
- All mail - every email received, newest first, with when it arrived, who sent it, the subject, which of your addresses it was sent to, a status, and how many attachments were kept.
- Needs review - the subset needing a human decision, with an amber count badge.
Seeing any of it needs the "View invoices and bank transactions" permission. A member without it sees an empty Intake rather than an error. The addresses themselves stay visible to everyone.
Status labels
| Label | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Completed | Processed and its attachments handled |
| Processing | Still being read |
| Failed | Something went wrong handling the email |
| Retired address | Sent to an alias that was retired |
| Auth failed | The sending domain failed its own authentication (SPF or DKIM) |
| Too large | Over the 25 MB limit |
| Rate limited | More than 200 emails in a day |
| Trial limit reached | The mail was fine; the trial plan's document allowance refused it |
| Multi-document | One PDF held several documents |
| Nothing to process | No attachment, or none that could be read |
Nothing to process covers two cases: an email with no attachment (a download-link email, for example) and one whose attachments are all unsupported. Open it: the reason and the files are listed.
A typo in the address leaves no trace at all. Mail to an address that does not exist is dropped without a row, without a bounce and without an error. If you forwarded something and Intake is empty, check the address first.
When Something Needs Attention
Open an email's row to see its attachments and the body.
- An attachment could not be saved. The count turns amber with a banner saying so. Upload that file manually from the Invoices page. Accountants can also download the raw email to see exactly what arrived.
- A PDF held several documents. It is flagged Multi-document and nothing is extracted from it. Split it into one document per invoice and forward the pieces.
- The app was not sure what a file was. It lands under Needs review with its best guess. Open it and use the reclassify control to set the right type: Invoice, Bank statement, Receipt, Credit note, Contract or Other. Any member can do this, and correcting it teaches the app for that sender's domain.
- A file could not be read. It shows Failed with the reason in plain words, for example a password-protected PDF or an unsupported file type. Fix the file, then forward or upload it again.
Tips
- Forward the original. The supplier's PDF extracts far better than a photo of a screen.
- One invoice per email is ideal, but several supported attachments on one email are fine: each becomes its own document.
- Open the email after forwarding something unusual. Attachments that were not processed are listed there with the reason.
- Keep the primary address semi-private, and claim a custom alias only where a supplier's system forces you to.
Related
- Uploading Files - the drag-and-drop and bulk-upload alternative
- Working with Invoices - what happens after extraction
- Messages - asking the other side about a specific document