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Bookkeeping starts with paper somebody else sent. The inbox is where it lands, and where it stays until the work it describes has been done.

Getting documents in

Forward them. Every firm has an inbound address that carries its connect code, which makes the address unguessable for the same reason the code is. Clients forward bills to it, or you forward them on. Attachments become documents; inline images — signatures and logos — are dropped, because a company footer is not a bill. A message with no attachment still lands, as a text document, so nothing arrives and vanishes. Upload them. The console’s Inbox page takes files directly, for the statement you just downloaded or the scan somebody handed you.
Executables, scripts, and archives are refused at the door. Everything the console renders in place is drawn from a short list of known-safe types — images, PDFs, plain text — and everything else is handed back as a download with a neutral type. SVG is accepted and stored but never rendered inline: it is an image by every ordinary definition, and it can carry script.

Working the inbox

A document arriving knows nothing about itself. Two facts make it useful:
  • Whose books. Which client company it belongs to. A document that has not been assigned shows under Inbox — unassigned on Today.
  • What kind of evidence. A bill, a receipt, a statement, an invoice, or other.
Assigning is not resolving. The document stays in the inbox until somebody says the work is done.

Reading one

Images and PDF pages come back to look at; text files come back as text. That is what lets an agent read a bill and propose the posting for it, and what lets a reviewer check the proposal against the document without leaving the page.

Resolving

A document leaves the inbox one of two ways:
  • Against the plan that carries its work. This is the audit path: from a posting, to the run that made it, to the plan it came from, to the document it came from. Six weeks later that path is the answer to “why is this here?”
  • As needing none. A duplicate, a statement already imported, a message that turned out to be a question.
Both are decisions and both leave a trace. Nothing is deleted to tidy the queue.

Receipts

A receipt is a document with a specific job: proving a card charge. Rather than filing it by hand, have the assistant score it against the unlinked charges on the firm’s expense cards — see expense claims. After a claim posts, the same document is what Zeno attaches to the QuickBooks transaction, so the evidence rides with the posting in the client’s own ledger as well as in yours.

Statements

A bank or card statement in the inbox does not have to be re-uploaded to be imported. Point the queue at the document already sitting there. The tools behind this page are listed under the firm inbox.