Turn an emailed bill into an expense

When a bill or receipt lands in your inbox, send it straight to your books without re-typing it:

Open the email in Mail.
In the strip above the message, click Extract to Books (or Book this expense for a receipt in the email body).

TALISK_HQ reads the vendor, amount, and tax and creates a draft bill. The strip then shows an In Books pill reading needs approval. Approving is what posts it to your books; extraction alone never posts.

Approve it without leaving Mail

Click the In Books pill and a small panel opens beside it, showing the supplier, the date, the total, the tax and the category on the document. When the bill needs nothing more than your yes, it offers:

Approve, which posts it, exactly as approving it in Expenses would;
Full review, which opens the same review screen Expenses uses, right here in Mail;
Open in Ledger, which takes you to the bill in Ledger › Expenses.

When TALISK_HQ needs you to look more closely, there is no Approve button. The panel says why, and Full review takes you to the screen where you can fix it. That happens when:

TALISK_HQ wasn't sure the document is a bill, or its read was uncertain;
the tax lines don't add up, or the date could read two ways;
the currency hasn't been confirmed;
it looks like a duplicate, a quote, or a supplier credit note;
it is a receipt and TALISK_HQ doesn't know yet how it was paid.

A bill in a different business than the one you have open says which business it is in. Switch to that business from the sidebar to approve it. A bill that is already approved says In your books.

If the bill is dated in a period you have closed, TALISK_HQ asks for your reason first, the same as anywhere else; cancel and nothing is posted. If approving is refused for any other reason, the panel says why and stays open.

In a conversation, every message speaks for itself

A bill belongs to one specific message, so on a conversation with several messages the strip is replaced by per-message controls. The conversation reads top to bottom in time order, with the newest message open at the bottom.

An In Books pill sits beside the sender's name on the message the bill came from, even when that message is collapsed. Click it to see the bill and, when it is ready, approve it there.
Every open message carries Reply, Reply All, and Forward on its own header line, beside the date. They act on that message alone, so you always know exactly which one you are answering or passing on.
Scan for a bill sits at the bottom of the open message, next to its attachments, and scans that message alone.
When you have an attachment open in the viewer, its toolbar also offers Scan for a bill. That scans the message the attachment actually came from, which is the surest way to capture a document you are looking at. Once that message has become a bill, the viewer shows In Books in that spot instead; click it and the viewer closes and the same approve panel opens.

Scroll down and the older messages slide away, leaving the newest one filling the pane with just its header line under the toolbar.

If a scan finds nothing, the message says No bill found in this message right where you clicked, and you can scan again.

Which book it goes in

If you keep more than one set of books, TALISK_HQ asks where the bill belongs before it extracts anything.

The answer comes from the mailbox the email arrived in, not from the book you happen to have open. Each connected mailbox can be assigned to a book in Settings › Email, and that assignment wins: an invoice sent to your supply company's mailbox belongs to that company's books even if you were looking at the cafe's at the time.

So when the mailbox belongs to a different book than the one you're working in, clicking Extract to Books tells you so and names both books. Confirm and it goes where the mailbox says. To send that mailbox's bills somewhere else, change its book in Settings › Email; every future bill from it follows.

If the mailbox isn't assigned to a book at all, TALISK_HQ can't tell which business the bill belongs to, so it asks you to pick one. The book you're currently working in is already selected, so if that's right, just confirm.

With one set of books you never see either question.

When TALISK_HQ gets it wrong

You can always say the opposite of whatever TALISK_HQ concluded, from the open email.

It found a bill, but it isn't one. Click Not a bill beside the In Books pill. TALISK_HQ asks first, naming the bill: Remove the DigitalOcean bill ($14.51) from your books? Press Remove bill and TALISK_HQ takes it back out of your books and stops scanning that email. If the bill was already approved, its entries are removed and any bank payment matched to it goes back to Ledger › Banking to be matched again; it's refused outright if the period is locked. The email itself stays where it is. You can bring the bill back from Discarded in Ledger › Expenses, then match the payment again.

It says there's no bill, but there is. The strip reads No bill found in this email. Click Scan it anyway and TALISK_HQ looks again straight away. Your ruling sticks: a later scan can't quietly go back to hiding it. Because TALISK_HQ wasn't confident about this one, the new bill may land in the Low Confidence section of Ledger › Expenses rather than Pending. Open it, check the details, then click Move to Pending to send it to your review queue and approve it there.

It didn't say anything at all. Most emails show no strip. Open the email and click Scan for a bill in the toolbar under the message; it works on any email, including one from a sender you've blocked for bill scanning. In a conversation, use the Scan for a bill button at the foot of the message that carries the document, or open the attachment and scan from the viewer.

You marked it "not a bill" by mistake. The strip reads Marked not a bill. Click Undo and the extract button comes back, so you can decide whether to scan.

Blocking a sender

After you mark an email "not a bill", TALISK_HQ offers Block sender too, which stops it scanning that vendor's mail for bills entirely. That's a separate, deliberate choice: marking one email never blocks a sender by itself. Undo reverses the "not a bill" mark only. To unblock a sender, go to Ledger › Vendor rules.

You can also block from a bill on Ledger › Expenses while it waits for review or sits in Discarded: the block icon asks first, then moves that bill and the sender's other bills waiting for review to Discarded (you can restore them) and skips new bills from the address. Your email is not affected: mail from that sender still arrives as usual.

Reviewing the emails TALISK_HQ flagged

When TALISK_HQ spots invoice emails that never made it into your books, it says so on your books-health panel: "N emails look like invoices you haven't recorded." That card gives you two ways in, and both list the exact emails rather than sending you to your inbox to hunt.

Review here opens the list right on the panel. Open as a page takes you to Ledger › Expenses › Invoice emails, which is a normal page, so you can hold Command and click it to open the list in its own tab and keep it beside your books while you work.

Each row names who the email is from, its subject, the date, and which of your connected mailboxes it arrived in. That last one matters: if the same supplier invoice was delivered to two of your accounts, you'll see two rows, and the mailbox is what tells them apart. Click a row to read the message without leaving the list.

Clearing the list

Every row carries its own answers, so you never have to clear the whole card to deal with one email.

Record it extracts the bill there and then, the same as scanning it from the open email.

Already recorded is for an invoice you did enter, by hand or from another copy of the same message. TALISK_HQ records that the email is accounted for and stops asking. This is not the same as "not a bill", and the difference matters: your mail still shows the email as being in your books, which is true.

Not a bill is for a statement, a receipt copy, a newsletter, anything that was never a bill in the first place.

Both answers are permanent, not a reminder pushed a few weeks out. If you change your mind, the row shows Undo, which puts it back to undecided.

When more than one email is still waiting, the bottom of the list offers to mark the rest already recorded in one go.

One thing worth knowing: after you answer an email, it leaves the books-health card for good, even if you undo. The card is a list of emails nobody has looked at yet, and once you've ruled on one it isn't that any more. The review list is where a decided email lives, and where you can change your mind about it.

From your phone

Open the email, tap More, then Look for a bill or receipt. TALISK_HQ reads it in the background and the bill turns up in Bills and receipts for you to check. Nothing reaches your books until you approve it there.

Reading can take up to a minute, and the sheet says so while it works. If that email is already in your books, it says so instead of reading it again.

If you keep books for more than one business, TALISK_HQ names the set it is going to before it starts. That is decided by the mailbox the email arrived in, not by the books you have open, so it is worth reading.