Document intake. Global Office: Sync

Five ways a document arrives

Photographed on the phone. The product was built for the phone first, not given a companion app with three buttons on it. The receipt is in the van, so is Global Office: Sync.
A PDF, dropped in. An emailed invoice, a utility statement, a certificate of insurance, a 1099 that came as an attachment. Up to 15MB, and it's read the same way a photograph is.
A folder of many, all at once. Drag it onto the reader for what's in it, or if it's a mix, drag it anywhere in the window1. Sync looks at each document and suggests what it is, and nothing is read in full until you agree. Nothing has to be renamed or put in any order, and a document dropped on the wrong reader is caught and offered the right one. See a mixed pile go in.
Typed straight in. Cash with no receipt, an invoice you raised by hand, a trip nobody photographed. Direct entry exists so that the things with no paper aren't the things that go missing. A loan or credit card payment can be split between interest and principal, so the two are never treated as the same thing.
Sent in by a client, with no account. A bookkeeper can make a link for one client, who opens it on their phone and adds photos or PDFs. No account, no password, nothing to install.

Caught before it's sent

A photograph too dark or too blurred to read is caught on the phone

Your phone checks it right there and asks what you want to do: Retake photo, or Use it anyway. You find out before you've walked away from the counter, not a minute after. Retaking it takes two seconds right then. The check happens on your device before the photo is uploaded. It doesn't use AI and nothing is sent anywhere just to decide whether the picture is clear enough.

And your photograph stays on the phone until it actually lands. A bad signal isn't your fault, so the photo waits there with everything you entered, and both go up together once you have a signal.

Nothing is ever filed pointing at a picture that's not there.

The Receipt scanner on a phone after a blurry photo: a box saying This photo looks blurry, that blurry photos often scan with details missing or wrong, with Cancel, Retake photo and Use it anyway buttons — Caught on the phone, before anything is sent.

A receipt isn't an invoice, and a certificate of insurance is neither

So each document type has its own button and its own reader, looking for its own fields. A receipt has line items, tax and shipping. A 1099 has a payer block. A certificate of insurance has several coverages, each with its own limits and its own expiry date. One general purpose reader looking for "the total" would find the total on all of them and miss everything that matters.

The eight ingestion buttons in a row: Receipt, Income, Donation, Utility, Mileage, Tax Docs, Compliance and Triage, each in its own ledger color — Global Office: Sync's buttons. Global Office: Sync - Contractors Edition and Global Office: Sync - Solo Edition have Quotes where Donation is; the rest are in every edition that has the ledger.

Receipt. Money going out, read down to the line: every item, the tax, the shipping, the payment method, and the job it belongs to if you name one.

Income. Invoices and anything that brought money in, with the lines separated into labor and the materials you bought and passed through.

Utility. Electric, gas, water and internet bills, read for the account number, the charges and the statement period, so a bill that never arrived can be noticed by its absence.

Mileage. Trips and travel logs. When standard mileage is used, each trip is valued at the IRS rate in force on the date it was driven rather than this year's rate.

Tax Docs. W-9s and the 1099 family. Both are read for the tax identification number, which is stored locked and shown as dots, and a 1099 is also read for the payer block and the amounts.

Compliance. Certificates of insurance, read for every coverage on the page with its carrier, its policy number, its limits and its own expiry date, and for who the certificate is actually made out to. In Global Office: Sync and Global Office: Sync - Contractors Edition. Global Office: Sync - Solo Edition is one person with nobody working for them, so it has no certificates to watch.

Donation. Donation receipts and acknowledgment letters, in Global Office: Sync only. Global Office: Sync - Contractors Edition and Global Office: Sync - Solo Edition don't take donations.

Quote. Quotes you have written, read for the customer, the job, the total and the date it expires, so a quote that runs out with nothing invoiced against it is noticed. In Global Office: Sync - Contractors Edition and Global Office: Sync - Solo Edition. Global Office: Sync has no Quotes ledger.

Triage. Not a document type. The desk where anything the reader couldn't make sense of waits for a person, which is the subject of the last section here.

A mixed pile

And when it's a folder of everything

Real paperwork doesn't come sorted. On a computer, drag the whole folder into the window with no scan button open, and a Mixed Pile box opens on its own. A bookkeeper is asked whose documents they are, unless a client is already chosen.

Drop it all there. Sync keeps the pictures and PDFs, goes through folders inside folders, and tells you about anything it left out. Every document is saved to Process Later, and when the last one is in, the box disappears with a poof.

A progress card over the app: Uploading File 4 of 6, with the name and size of the PDF going in

The Mixed Pile box: Any mix of paperwork, even a whole folder, a folder being dragged onto it, Drop it all here, and chips for Receipts, Income, Utilities, Tax Docs, Compliance and Donations, for The Guitar Nerd — Drag a folder in with no scan button open, and this opens on its own.

Then Sync gives each document one quick look and suggests what it is and who it's from. When you process one, the suggestion is the big button on top, and the other kinds are right below it.

An invoice somebody else made out is a bill you pay. Only an invoice the business sent counts as income. When Sync can't tell which it is, it asks.

Nothing is read in full or filed until you click the button.

What is this document? with a Musician's Friend order beside it: Sync thinks this is a receipt from Musician's Friend, a large Yes, it's a receipt button, and Income, Utility, Tax Doc, Compliance and Donation below it, then Process Remaining Later — Sync's suggestion on top, one click to agree.

One receipt, all the way in

The same receipt all the way through: an amplifier repair order from a local shop, $245 on the 30th of June, five handwritten lines of parts and labor, paid by check. Ten to twenty seconds on a normal connection2, and the only thing a person does is look at the review and say yes.

The Receipt ingestion console: a drop zone reading drag and drop files here or click to select, PNG, JPG or PDF up to 15MB, with a Direct Expense Entry button under it for something that has no document — Drop it in, or type it straight in.

The same screen after the drop, in Global Office: Sync: a list to pick which client the receipt belongs to, with a line across the top saying it's already being read in the background — In Global Office: Sync, say whose it is. It's already reading.

The same screen a moment later, reading the document: pipeline checkpoints ticking off as it receives the file, extracts the text, merges the client's chart of accounts and maps the line items — It names each checkpoint as it passes it.

The review screen with the photograph of the repair order beside it: dated 6/30/26 and read into five lines, two power resistors, a half watt resistor, materials, two filament balance resistors and the labor, each with its amount, the job Home Studio and account 6080, Instrument Repairs and Equipment Maintenance, and the box to say it's all correct — Every line of a handwritten repair order, read correctly and matched to your own chart of accounts: all five to 6080, Instrument Repairs and Equipment Maintenance. Nothing to fix, and it still waits for you to say yes.

That same repair order in the Receipts ledger a moment later: the Amplification & Repair row selected at $245.00 on 06/30/2026, with the photograph still attached beside it and every field it read listed underneath, filed to the Home Studio job and paid by check — And there it is, filed. Same repair order, same $245, with the photograph still attached to it.

Nothing is filed before somebody has looked at it

The review screen is one screen, with the photograph beside the numbers3, so checking a figure never means opening something else. Anything that needs a second look says why in words rather than in a color.

A line it couldn't read is marked and left blank. It won't fill in a financial field by guessing. A plausible wrong number is worse than an empty box, because nobody checks a box that's already full.
The category is a proposal, matched against a real chart of accounts. In Global Office: Sync, that client's own chart with their own account numbers, so account 090 stays 090. In Global Office: Sync - Contractors Edition and Global Office: Sync - Solo Edition there's no chart of accounts at all and the matching to your accounting software's accounts happens on its own when the record is sent over.
What it can't place comes back as a question. Marked and named, rather than swept into a catch-all like QuickBooks' Uncategorized Expense.
Your correction is remembered. Categorize something once and it stays categorized that way. Month six costs less time than month one.
Accept, correct, or decline. A document sent in by a client can be declined with a reason the client never sees.
Every correction goes into the Audit Trail, beside the value the reader proposed, for as long as the account exists, with the document attached.

When the reader can't make sense of something

It's held, not dropped. The worst failure is the quiet one. A record that went nowhere without a word is one you hear about from an auditor, not from your app.

It goes to the Triage Room and waits for you to finish it by hand. It's never guessed at, and it never silently disappears.
A scan that can't reach the reader at all says so in words. You get a blank form to fill in yourself and a sentence explaining what happened, because a dead signal and a receipt that genuinely had nothing on it must never look the same.
If the books can't be reached, the record is set aside, not lost. It's kept somewhere safe and filed on its own once the books answer again, and the spare copy isn't thrown away until the record is actually in.

The Triage desk open over the app: documents waiting for a human to finish them, and none waiting right now — An empty Triage desk is the normal state. Anything in it is waiting for a person, not for a retry.

Many at once needs a wide screen: a computer, or a tablet turned sideways. Dragging a mixed pile in needs a computer. On a phone, documents go in one at a time. Back

Ten to twenty seconds is what it takes on a normal connection. It moves with the document and with the signal you're on: a long, creased till receipt photographed in a truck takes longer to send and longer to read than a one page PDF, and a weak connection lengthens the part that's sending the picture, which is most of it. Back

Side by side needs a wide screen: a computer, or a tablet turned sideways. On a phone the same screen shows one half at a time, with a Document tab and a Details tab to switch between the photograph and what was read from it. Back