Forward an email

Your inbox is already your filing system

You receive invoices by email. Receipts by email. Contracts, certificates, tax documents — all email. Right now you download them, rename them, upload them somewhere, and hope you remember the folder structure in six months. Or you just leave them in Gmail and search when you need them, which works until it doesn't.

Workplace gives you a dedicated email address. Forward the email. The attachment is saved, the document is read — OCR if needed — key data is extracted (amounts, dates, names, document type), and it is classified and filed automatically. You don't name it, you don't choose a folder, you don't fill in a form.

The workflow mirrors what you already do. You receive an invoice, you glance at it, you forward it. The difference is that forwarding it to Workplace means it is actually processed, not just moved from one inbox to another.

What it extracts

An invoice arrives. Workplace reads the vendor name, invoice number, date, amount, tax breakdown, and line items. It links the invoice to the vendor in your directory if they exist, or flags it for review if they don't. A receipt? Amount, date, merchant, category. A contract? Parties, dates, terms, expiry. The extracted data is searchable and connected to the rest of the system.

It handles PDFs, images of paper documents — photographed receipts, scanned letterheads — and common office formats. Multi-page documents are processed completely. If someone sends you a 14-page contract as a PDF, the key dates and terms are extracted from the full document, not just the first page.

Handwritten documents and poor-quality scans are flagged for manual review rather than guessed at. The system knows when it is not confident enough to extract reliably, and it tells you instead of making something up.

Classification

Documents are classified into categories: invoices, receipts, employment contracts, partner agreements, certificates, tax documents, personal documents. The classification is suggested — you can change it. Over time, the system learns your patterns. If your accountant always sends from the same address with "Rechnung" in the subject, that is an invoice.

Classification is not just a label. It determines where the document lives in the system, what data fields are extracted, who can see it, and how long it is retained. An employment contract is linked to the employee record, visible to HR, and retained for the legally required period. A receipt is linked to the expense, visible to accounting, and retained per your document policy.

Email as interface

This is broader than document filing. You can email Workplace to request time off — "I'd like to take Friday off" — and the system parses the request, checks your balance, checks for team conflicts, and either processes it or asks for manager approval. You can report sick leave — "I'm sick today, won't be in" — and the record is created immediately.

You can ask questions by email. "What's our office alarm code?" gets the answer from Secure Notes, sent back to your email. "How many holiday days do I have left?" gets the number from the time off module. The email is parsed, the intent is classified, and the action is executed or the answer is returned — by email.

Authentication works through your email address, which is linked to your employee profile. Workplace knows who you are because it knows your email. No passwords for these interactions, no login — your email is your identity for routine operations. For sensitive actions, it asks for confirmation before proceeding.

The audit trail

Every document forwarded, every action taken via email — logged. Who sent it, when, what was extracted, how it was classified, where it was filed. When the auditor asks for the invoice from April, you search by vendor name or amount and it is there, with the original email attached as provenance.

This matters for compliance. EU regulations require that you can demonstrate the chain of custody for financial documents. When the document entered the system, who handled it, whether it was modified — all recorded automatically because the email itself is the audit trail. You did not need to maintain it. It maintained itself.