Pre-classification
How Inbox Ledger filters non-financial PDFs out of the pipeline before processing.
Pre-classification
What pre-classification does
Every PDF that arrives from an email source (Gmail, Outlook, or IMAP) is checked by an AI model before it is stored. The model labels it financial (an invoice or receipt) or non-financial. When the model is confident the file is non-financial, at a confidence of 0.7 or higher, Inbox Ledger skips it: nothing is stored, no extraction runs, and no credit is spent.
Why it exists
Inboxes carry a lot that is not an invoice: newsletters, product brochures, signed contracts, and marketing attachments. Pre-classification keeps your credit balance and your Documents list focused on the files you actually care about.
What gets skipped
These are the kinds of PDF pre-classification filters out:
- Marketing material such as brochures, catalogs, and whitepapers
- Contracts and signed agreements with no totals or line items
- Newsletters and announcements that ship with a PDF
- Manuals, technical documents, blank pages, and plain letters
Scanned files with very little readable text are harder to classify, so a genuine invoice with low text density is occasionally skipped. If that happens, the bypass routes below get it processed.
When the check errors
If the classifier call fails for any reason, a timeout, an API error, or a malformed response, the document is treated as financial and goes through the full pipeline. Pre-classification only ever removes work. An infrastructure hiccup never blocks a real invoice.
How to bypass it
Three routes skip the classifier, because each one signals that you meant to send the file:
- Manual upload. Anything you drag into the Documents page is always processed.
- Forwarding addresses. Email sent to your
@fw.inboxledger.appaddress is always processed. - Reprocess. Re-running the pipeline on a document from the detail view forces a full extraction pass.
If pre-classification skipped something it should have kept, forward it to your forwarding address or upload it by hand. Both routes bypass the check. Seeing the same false positive repeat? Send the PDF to support@inboxledger.app. The reports we get help us tune the classifier.
Where to see the count
Each sync run reports how many files it skipped this way in a counter named documentsSkippedNonFinancial.
You will find it in the sync stats on the Sources page after a sync finishes.
Related
Manual upload
Drag PDFs in and bypass the classifier.
Forwarding addresses
Forward emails directly into Inbox Ledger.
Document marked non-financial
Troubleshooting a false positive.
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