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 marked pending review. The strip then shows an In Books pill: click it to open the bill in Ledger › Expenses, where you review and approve it. Approving is what posts it to Accounts Payable; extraction alone never posts.

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 removes the bill from your books and stops extracting that email. If the bill was already approved, this reverses its journal entries, so you get a confirmation first telling you exactly that; it's refused outright if the period is locked. You can bring the bill back from the discard pile in Ledger › Expenses.

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 approve it right there or click Move to Pending to send it to your review queue.

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.

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.

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.