Before you start
Check that the company is connected and that you can identify which client the document belongs to. Use a readable file with the full date, amount, and supplier details. Keep uncertain documents unassigned until you know whose books they belong to.Getting documents in
Two ways: forward the mail, or upload the file. Either way the document lands on the Inbox page, waiting for somebody to say whose books it belongs to.Forward by email
Every firm has its own inbox address. It is printed at the top of the console’s Inbox page, with a Copy button beside it. It is your firm’s name followed by a short code:1
Forward the mail
Forward a bill, receipt or statement from your own mailbox to the inbox
address, with the attachment on it. Several attachments on one mail are
fine: each one becomes a document.
2
Open the Inbox page
The documents show under Waiting, marked by email with the address
they came from. A forwarded document does not know which client it is
for, so it arrives unassigned.
3
Say whose books it is
Pick the client in the Company column and the kind of evidence in
Kind, or ask your assistant to sort the inbox for you.
Clients can send to it directly
Give clients the address and they can send their bills straight in, with no forward through you. They should save it as a contact, because nobody types it twice. The address only lets someone put a document in your inbox, where a person reads it before anything is done with it. It cannot read your inbox, sign in, or reach anybody’s books.A forwarding rule
To send a whole mailbox’s bills without forwarding them by hand, set up a forwarding rule to the inbox address, in Gmail, Outlook or anywhere else. Rules that match only the mail you want (from a vendor, or with invoice in the subject) keep the inbox from filling with newsletters. Gmail checks that you own an address before it will forward to it. It mails a confirmation code to the address you entered, and that mail lands in your Zeno inbox as a text document. Open it on the Inbox page, copy the code back into Gmail, and then dismiss the document.What is kept
- Attachments. Each becomes a document. PDFs and images open right on the page.
- The mail’s words, when there is nothing attached. A client’s instructions are evidence too, so a mail with no attachment is kept as a text document named after its subject.
- Not signatures and logos. Pictures placed in the body of a mail, rather than attached to it, are dropped, because a company footer is not a bill. If a phone puts a photo of a receipt in the body, send it as an attachment.
- Only document files. Zeno keeps PDFs, photos and scans (JPEG, PNG,
HEIC, TIFF and the like), CSV and OFX statement exports, IIF files,
.xlsxand.docx, plain text, and emails saved as.eml. Anything else is refused: programs, scripts,.zipand other archives, and the Office formats that can carry macros (.xls,.xlsm,.doc,.docm). The mail’s words are still kept, as a text document that names each file it refused and why, so nothing arrives and vanishes. Send the PDFs themselves instead of a zip, so each one can be read and coded on its own, and save an old spreadsheet as.xlsxor PDF. - Nothing the malware scanner flags. Every file is scanned before it is kept. A flagged file is never stored, and the text document names it too.
If the address gets out
The address is not a password, but it does let whoever has it put documents in your inbox. If it ends up somewhere it should not be and junk starts arriving, an owner or operator can press Replace beside it on the Inbox page. The old address stops working at once, and mail sent to it afterwards is not delivered. Send the new address to every client and forwarding rule that used the old one.Upload them
The Add documents button on the Inbox page takes files directly: the statement you just downloaded, or the scan somebody handed you. You can pick several at once, up to 15 MB each. A file whose bytes are already in the inbox still uploads, with a note that it may be the same document twice. If the malware scanner is briefly unreachable when a file arrives, the file is kept rather than refused, and its row on the Inbox page says it was not scanned. Open it with the same care you would give any attachment.Every file is checked twice before it is kept: it has to be one of the
document types above, and it is scanned for malware. A file that fails
either check is never stored, however it arrived: forwarded, uploaded, or
sent by a client. Everything the console shows in place is drawn from a short
list of known-safe types — images, PDFs, plain text — and only when the
file’s contents really are that type; everything else is handed back as a
download.
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.
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.
