Support / Gmail
Extract invoices and receipts from Gmail.
In short
Imprest reads your Gmail inbox for invoices, bills and receipts and turns each one into an item you review. Nothing from email reaches your books until a person accepts it. Your mailbox is private to start: only you see what comes in from it.
Before you start
Gmail is opening company by company. If connecting says "Connecting Gmail isn't available for this company yet," it hasn't reached your company. A mailbox that's already connected keeps syncing and can be reconnected.
You need an owner, admin, accountant or bookkeeper role in Imprest, and the Google account for the mailbox. Imprest asks Google for read-only access to your mail. It can't send, delete or change anything in Gmail. You can connect more than one mailbox.
Your mailbox is private to start. Only you see what comes in from it, and teammates see nothing from it until you post something. You can share a company mailbox, such as a billing address, in its settings. Only the mailbox's owner can change them.
Connect Gmail
- Open Apps and select Add a connection.
- On the Gmail card, select Connect.
- Choose your Google account and allow access.
- Back in Imprest, the first sync starts right away. Open the Gmail page in Apps to see the Inbox, Integration Settings and How it works tabs.
What comes in, and how it lands in your books
To start, Imprest looks at the last 90 days of mail in all folders, and skips:
- Gmail's Promotions, Social and Updates tabs, and always Spam and Trash.
- Replies and forwards.
- Mail that fails the sender checks email uses to spot forgeries.
Each email that looks like a transaction becomes an item in the Inbox, with the sender, amount, date and attached PDF. Receipts are also filed in your Receipts inbox, where they can match a card charge.
Your trust rules and the vendors you already have move items to Ready to Post, but you still accept each one. Accepting creates the bill or expense and posts it, or saves a draft if something is missing. When the same document already came in from another app, Imprest skips the email copy.
In Integration Settings, you can change how far back Imprest looks (30, 90 or 365 days, or only new mail), which folders and tabs it reads, and your skip and trust rules.
Day to day
- Imprest checks each mailbox on a schedule you can set in Integration Settings, from every hour to once a day.
- Review new items in the Gmail Inbox and accept the ones that belong in your books.
- To check now, open Connection health in Apps and select Sync on the mailbox.
Common problems
The authorization expired or was revoked
If Google's approval ends, for example because you removed Imprest from your Google account, syncing stops and Integration Settings shows a warning. Select Reconnect, then Continue to Google. When you reconnect, Imprest looks back far enough to cover the gap, up to 365 days.
An email didn't come in
Check whether it's older than your lookback window, sits in a skipped tab such as Updates or Promotions, is a reply or forward, or matches one of your skip rules.
You can't change a mailbox's settings
Only the person who connected a mailbox can change its settings. If that person has left the company, reconnect the mailbox with its Google account to become its owner, or disconnect it.
The sign-in expired
If Imprest says the sign-in attempt expired, start again from Apps.
Pause or disconnect
To stop syncing for a while, open the Gmail page in Apps and select Pause. Everything is kept, and Resume picks up again.
- To disconnect, open the Gmail page in Apps and select Disconnect.
- Confirm with Disconnect integration.
Imprest revokes its access to your Gmail and removes the connection, your rules, and the items you hadn't reviewed yet. Everything you already posted to your books stays. To use Gmail again, you connect it from the start.