What Your First Week Looks Like

You're being asked to point an AI at your inbox and let it write into your ledger. Wanting to watch it work before that happens is reasonable, so DocStreamAI is built to run that way.

In manual mode it reads your email, extracts every document, resolves your vendors and proposes a category for every line — and creates nothing in QuickBooks or Xero. You see exactly what it would have done, on your own documents, before it is allowed to do any of it.

Here's what that week actually looks like.

Setting it up so nothing posts

There is no single read-only switch. You're setting four controls, and it's worth knowing what each one closes, because the fourth is the one people miss.

Open Integrations, click Connect on the QuickBooks Online or Xero card, and set these in the panel before you authorize:

That last row is the one to pay attention to. Receipt approval ships off by default. The three Manual settings govern whether DocStreamAI creates anything, and on Manual it never does. But a receipt that matches a transaction already in your books takes a different path: with Receipt approval off, DocStreamAI attaches the receipt image to that existing transaction on its own.

That creates nothing and changes no number. It is still a write to your accounting file, so if the point of the week is that nothing happens without you, turn Receipt approval on. You can turn it back off later; most people do.

With those four set, DocStreamAI's entire footprint in QuickBooks or Xero is reading — it pulls your vendor list and chart of accounts so it can match against them. It writes nothing.

Then you leave it alone

Connect Gmail or Outlook, and set your industry carefully during onboarding — it drives the default expense categories, so it's the one setup choice worth slowing down for.

After that, there's nothing to do. Your ordinary email arrives, and documents process on their own. Vendor sync from your accounting software starts automatically and takes a few minutes.

What you'll be looking at

Open Invoices a day or two in. Every invoice that arrived is sitting there, already extracted: vendor, invoice number, invoice date, due date, subtotal, tax, total, and each line item with the expense category DocStreamAI picked for it.

Open Vendors and you'll see your real vendor list, synced from QuickBooks or Xero, alongside the matches DocStreamAI made against it — so "ACME SUPPLY" on an invoice resolving to "Acme Supply Co." in your books is visible as a match, not a guess you have to take on faith.

That is the entire product, running on your documents. About ninety seconds with any one of them tells you what you need to know.

You'll also see what DocStreamAI held back rather than processing on its own. Documents wait for a human when they're a duplicate of one already processed, when an invoice has no due date (usually a purchase order or quote that shouldn't be a bill), when subtotal plus tax doesn't equal the total, when the company name isn't yours, or when the categorization came back low confidence. Those gates are on by default and stay on after the trial. They're the difference between a system that's confidently wrong and one that hands back the few documents worth a second look.

Turning it on

When you've seen enough, approve one. Pick an invoice, approve it, then open QuickBooks or Xero and look at what appeared: the vendor, the date, the amount, the account, the attachment. That's the whole loop, end to end.

From there the usual progression is:

1. Manual while you're getting a feel for it.
2. Hybrid next, which auto-submits only when both the sender's email and the vendor name are recognized. An unknown sender or a new vendor still waits for you. Most businesses stay here.
3. Automatic once you trust the vendor list — known vendors submit without review.

You don't have to move all three together. Invoices, receipt expenses and recurring invoices each have their own control, so running receipts on Hybrid while invoices are still on Manual is normal.

A few things worth knowing

Nothing is deleted. DocStreamAI creates bills, expenses and credit memos, and attaches documents to transactions. There is no path in it that voids or deletes a transaction in your accounting software.

Duplicate detection runs regardless of your settings. An invoice matching one already processed is held even on Automatic. It isn't something you can accidentally turn off.

Per-vendor settings beat global ones. Setting a default category on a vendor, or forcing one vendor to always wait for review, applies from then on — usually worth more than any amount of global tuning.