Documentation/ Uploading documents/ Ways documents come in
Ways documents come in
Dijit.app takes documents four ways: the web application, email, a connected Dropbox folder and the API. What happens afterwards, meaning the reading, the extraction, the checks and the coding, is identical on all four.
On this page
Web application on a desktop
Uploading by hand from the application itself. It takes PDFs, images and ZIP files, several at a time.
It is the only route that lets you get at the pages before anything is processed: keep the ones you want, throw the rest away, or break a file into separate documents. On accounts counted by the page, that is what decides how much of the plan you spend.
Full guide: Uploading by hand.
Web application on a phone
Open the application on a phone and you get the Quick Access screen instead of the dashboard. Its buttons lead to the same upload screen as on a desktop, so capturing on a phone has all the same features, including grouping several photographs as one document.
Full guide: Uploading from a phone, and photos.
You connect a mailbox over IMAP and the system checks it at intervals. Attachments on the messages that arrive are taken in and processed with nobody touching them.
Each connection is tied to one document type: whatever comes through that mailbox always lands in the matching list. To keep flows apart, purchase invoices one side and expenses the other, set up separate connections.
This is the usual route when suppliers email their invoices. What we would advise is a dedicated address, given out to your suppliers.
Full guide: Documents arriving by email.
A Dropbox folder
You authorise the Dropbox account and pick a folder. Anything dropped into it is processed at the next sync.
It suits a business that already works in shared folders: whoever scans the paperwork puts the files where they always put them and never has to open the application.
Full guide: A Dropbox folder.
The API
Documents pushed in from your own systems, whether a supplier portal, a document manager or something built for you, over a REST API.
It has to be switched on with Dijit.app's technical team; it is not something you configure in the application. It is the route for high, steady volumes.
Which to use when
| Situation | Route |
|---|---|
| Paper documents, scanned | Web application on a desktop |
| Invoices your suppliers email over | An email connection |
| Files other people drop in a shared folder | A Dropbox folder |
| Documents produced by one of your own systems | The API |
| Documents photographed away from the office | Web application on a phone, grouping the photos of one document |
| You need to throw pages away before processing | Web application on a desktop |
The routes are not exclusive. The commonest set-up is an email connection for the everyday flow plus uploading by hand for whatever arrives another way.
How the source is recorded
Every document remembers the route it came in by, shown in the Source column of the list:
| Value | What it means |
|---|---|
| Manual upload | Uploaded by a user from the application. |
| Taken in from an email connection. | |
| API | Pushed in by an outside system. |
| Duplicate | Spotted as a duplicate of a document already there. |
| Moved | Not a new arrival at all: it came from another list when its type was changed. |
It is what lets you tell, when a document is missing, whether it never arrived or whether it arrived and was filed in another list.
What it costs you
The route makes no difference to what you are charged. That is counted on what comes out of processing: the page on a business account, the invoice on an accountancy practice account.