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How to Process 50 Invoices a Month in Under 1 Hour

50 invoices per month is about the point where manual processing becomes genuinely painful — roughly 3–4 hours if done by hand. With the right setup, you can process the same volume in under 30 minutes, including review time.

The setup (one-time, ~15 minutes)

  1. 1Create an InboxBill account and note your forwarding email address
  2. 2Connect FreeAgent via Settings → Integrations
  3. 3Set up Gmail/Outlook forwarding rules for supplier emails
  4. 4Configure auto-approval rules for your top 5 regular suppliers
  5. 5Set default nominal codes for your main expense categories

The monthly workflow (ongoing, ~25 minutes)

1

Auto-processing runs in the background

Invoices forwarded to InboxBill are extracted by AI and auto-approved if they match your rules. You don't need to do anything for these.

2

Weekly review batch (10–15 min)

Once a week, open InboxBill and review invoices in the pending queue. These are the ones that need human eyes — unusual amounts, new suppliers, AI wasn't confident. Quick scan, approve or reject.

3

Monthly FreeAgent check (5–10 min)

At month end, confirm all pending invoices are processed, check for any flagged duplicates, and run a quick reconcile against your bank feed in FreeAgent.

Time breakdown

TaskManualWith InboxBill
Data extraction (50 invoices)3.5 hours0 minutes (automated)
Review and approve30 min15–20 minutes
FreeAgent entry2 hours0 minutes (automated)
Filing PDFs30 min0 minutes (automated)
Total~6.5 hours~20 minutes

Start processing 50 invoices in under an hour

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