So far you have created a case and then put documents into it. Real work often happens the other way round: the document arrives first, and nobody has decided what it is yet.
An email lands with three attachments. A scanner produces forty pages. A partner posts a file through an integration. A colleague has a certificate in their hand and does not know which case it belongs to.
Inbound is the named place for that.
Why it is not just a dossier in "New"
This trips people up, so it is worth being blunt about: an inbound document is not a dossier sitting in a waiting state. It is a different thing with a different lifecycle.
The reason is measurement. A queue of things that might be work, mixed in with the queue of things that definitely are, is a queue nobody can measure. "How many open cases do we have?" stops having an answer the moment unclassified files are counted among them.
Where documents come from
| Channel | What it means |
|---|---|
| An attachment on a message sent to a watched mailbox | |
| Scanner | A page or batch from a scanning session |
| API | A direct call from another system |
| Manual upload | A person uploaded it without choosing a destination |
Manual upload is the one worth explaining to your team. It exists so that somebody who does not know which process a document belongs to has somewhere to put it — instead of guessing a process and creating a dossier in the wrong place, which is considerably harder to undo.
Tell people: if you are not sure, put it in Inbound. That instruction is cheaper than the cleanup.
The queue
Open Inbound in the left menu. Each row shows the document, where it came from, what state it is in, and what the classifier thinks it is.
| Status | Means |
|---|---|
| Received | Stored, waiting for extraction |
| Extracting | Text and structure are being read |
| Classifying | A destination process is being proposed |
| Awaiting review | A person has to choose the destination |
| Routing | The destination is decided, the dossier is being made |
| Routed | It is now a document inside a dossier |
| Discarded | A person decided this should not become a case |
| Failed | Processing failed. The reason is recorded, and it can be retried |
You only appear at "Awaiting review", and only when the machine is not confident enough. That is the design, and it is the opposite of the usual arrangement where a person approves every automatic decision because one of them might be wrong. Confidence is a number the system already has; using it to decide who looks is what makes the volume manageable.
Failed is a state, not an error. The reason is recorded and the document can be retried — which is what stops an integration problem becoming a log line nobody reads.
Reviewing one
Click a row in Awaiting review. You see the document, and the destination the classifier proposed. Three things you can do:
- Confirm the proposed process. It routes, a dossier is created or chosen, and the file lands inside it.
- Change the destination and confirm.
- Discard it. Marketing mail, a duplicate, something that was never a case.
A dossier created here starts in Draft, because a person decided where it goes. Only the dossiers the machine creates on its own, when it routes with confidence, start in New.
Uploading something yourself
Inbound → Upload is the screen for a file with no destination yet. Drop it, and it joins the queue like anything else — extracted, classified, and put in front of somebody if the machine is unsure.
Sending the same thing twice is safe
An email connector that retries does not create duplicates. Each inbound document carries its channel and the identifier the sender gave the delivery, so a message with three attachments becomes three documents distinguished by content, and a replay of that same message adds nothing.
You will never notice this working. It is the reason nobody has to clean up after a retry.
What you should have now
- At least one document in the queue.
- One routed into a dossier, so you have seen the join between this chapter and the last one.
- Your team told the one rule that matters: when in doubt, Inbound.