Inbox — AI document intake for bills, receipts and deliveries

Plain-English summary#

Inbox is where paperwork goes before it becomes a record. Drop in a supplier bill, a receipt, a delivery note or a bank statement — as a PDF, a photo, an Excel file or a CSV — and Foodops reads it for you: supplier, date, reference, currency, subtotal, tax, total and the line items. It then waits in a queue marked Needs review until a person confirms the numbers. Only when you press the button does it become a real Bill draft, Expense record or Purchase receive.

Nothing posts until you approve it. The AI drafts; you decide. Every read is shown next to the original document so you can check it against the paper, and any value the AI was unsure about is flagged.

It lives in the back office under Expenses → Inbox, and it is off unless it has been switched on for your organisation — see Prerequisites.

When you'd use this#

• A stack of supplier invoices arrived and you don't want to type each one into Bills.
• A driver dropped off a delivery note and you want it turned into a Purchase Receive against the right PO.
• Staff photograph receipts on their phones and you want them captured as expense records.
• You want a guard against paying twice: the Inbox flags a document that looks like one you've already had.
• You want to trace a posted bill back to the actual scan it came from.

Prerequisites#

• The Inbox must be switched on for your organisation. This is the one that catches people out. It is off by default, so the Inbox menu entry and the upload buttons are hidden until it's turned on for your organisation. There is no per-user or per-browser setting.
• Bills permission. You need Bills View or Bills Create — the same permission as Bills. Without one of them the Inbox entry won't show in the sidebar.

How to access#

Walkthrough — turn a supplier invoice into a Bill draft#

1. Open Expenses → Inbox.
2. Add the file. Drag it anywhere onto the panel (a "Drop to upload" overlay appears) or use the Upload documents button. You can select several files at once. Accepted: PDF, JPG/JPEG, PNG, GIF, WEBP, XLSX, XLS, CSV, up to 10 MB each — a bigger file is refused by name before anything uploads.
3. Each file shows as Processing straight away and switches to Needs review once it's been read — no need to refresh the page.
4. Pick the row. The left pane is the queue, the right pane is the selected document. ↑/↓ (or k/j) move through the queue and Enter opens the selected document for review.
5. Review the reads. The review screen shows the original document beside the details read from it — supplier name, address, phone, document date, due date, reference, PO reference, currency, subtotal, tax, total — and the line items. Anything read with less than 70% confidence is marked "Low confidence — check this value". That's your cue to compare it with the paper.
6. Fix what's wrong. Edits save automatically as you go. If a colleague is working on the same document, you're told to reload rather than having your changes silently overwritten.
7. Confirm the supplier. If the supplier name read from the document doesn't match one of your suppliers, you must pick or create one before it can post — otherwise you'll see "Pick the supplier first."
8. Post it. Press Create bill draft. The bill lands as a Draft like any other bill, with the original file attached. If attaching the file fails, you get a warning telling you to add it from the Files tab.
9. The document's status becomes Converted, and its row links to the bill it became.

Walkthrough — a delivery note into a Purchase Receive#

1. Open the Inbox (or come in from Purchase Receives, which shows only delivery notes and priced invoices).
2. Select the delivery note. A document recognised as a delivery note opens in the receive panel rather than the bill panel.
3. The PO links itself when it safely can. If the document quotes a PO reference and exactly one open purchase order matches it, the receive is linked to that PO automatically; if it's unclear, you choose. Changing the supplier clears the link, because a PO belongs to its supplier.
4. Check the quantities against the PO lines. PO lines this delivery doesn't cover simply stay outstanding.
5. Post it — the result is a draft purchase receive, linked back to the original document.

Key concepts#

• Nothing posts until you approve it. Uploading creates a document, not a bill. The queue is a holding area; turning a document into a record is a button a person presses.
• Status drives the queue. A document is Processing (being read) → Needs review (read, waiting for a person) → Converted (became a record) or Dismissed (deliberately not posted), with Failed for a read that didn't work. The tabs are All / Needs review / Processing / Failed / Converted / Dismissed, each with a live count. All is the default, so a document doesn't vanish from your screen the moment its status changes.
• Document type vs destination. The AI decides whether a document is a bill, an expense receipt, a bank statement, a delivery note or other, and suggests where it should go: delivery note → Purchase receive, bill → Bill, anything else → Expense record. You can change the destination, and your choice sticks from then on.
• Two warning flags. Possible duplicate (looks like a document you've already had — the row links to the match) and No supplier (a supplier name was read but matched none of your suppliers, so it can't post yet). "Low confidence" is not a list filter — confidence is shown on the document itself.
• Large-value filter. Documents worth 10,000 or more in your base currency get their own filter, using your organisation's exchange rates to compare foreign documents with local ones. A document whose value can't be converted is never treated as if it were worth zero.
• Dismiss vs delete. Dismiss needs a reason, keeps the document as a record of the decision not to post it, and is the right choice for something like a bank statement. Delete permanently removes the document and its file. You can't delete a document that has already been converted — it's the proof behind the record it created.
• Bank statements don't post from here. A document recognised as a bank statement shows a banner saying bank statements are not imported through the Inbox. Dismiss the Inbox copy.

Common questions#

Q: What is the Inbox in Expenses? A: It's the AI document-intake queue. Drop a supplier bill, receipt, delivery note or statement into it (PDF, image, Excel or CSV, up to 10 MB). Foodops reads the supplier, dates, reference, currency, tax, totals and line items, and the document waits in a Needs review list until a person confirms the numbers. Confirming turns it into a Bill draft, an Expense record or a Purchase receive. Nothing posts on its own.

Q: I can't see Inbox in my sidebar — where has it gone? A: The Inbox is off by default and has to be switched on for your organisation — there's no setting you can flip yourself and no per-user option. You also need Bills View or Bills Create permission for the entry to show.

Q: What file types can I upload, and how big? A: PDF, JPG/JPEG, PNG, GIF, WEBP, XLSX, XLS and CSV — up to 10 MB per file. You can drop several at once. A file over the limit is rejected by name before anything uploads.

Q: Does uploading a document create a bill straight away? A: No. Uploading creates a document in the queue as Processing, which becomes Needs review once it's been read. A bill, expense record or purchase receive is only created when you press the button on the review screen — and the bill arrives as a Draft, just like one you'd typed in yourself.

Q: How do I know which numbers the AI wasn't sure about? A: Anything read with less than 70% confidence is flagged with a "check this value" marker. The original document is shown alongside the values, so checking takes a glance.