Help / Quickstart

Scan a year of paperwork in an afternoon

This is one worked example, start to finish: point a scanner at indecs, feed it a stack of paper and get back searchable, renamed files. If you just want the reference docs, see the main help page.

1. Set up your address

1. Sign up with your email and password, then confirm your email (the link is valid for 24 hours).
2. Pick a username - this becomes your indecs address, username@indecs.app.
3. In the dashboard, set your forwarding address - this is where processed documents land. It can be the same inbox you signed up with, or a different one.

That's the whole account setup. Anything sent to your indecs address from this point on gets scanned, summarised and forwarded.

2. Point your scanner at it

Most office multifunction printers can scan straight to an email address ("scan to email"). In the scanner's admin panel, look for SMTP or email settings and set:

• Destination address: username@indecs.app
• SMTP server: whatever your scanner's manual specifies for its own outbound relay (indecs receives mail at your address - it does not act as an SMTP relay for your scanner)

Some scanners (many Canon, Xerox and older HP models) require an authenticated SMTP relay rather than sending directly - if "scan to email" fails silently, this is the most common cause. Check the scanner's network settings for an SMTP username and password field; if your office already has scan-to-email working for another address, point it at your indecs address the same way.

If your scanner only writes to a folder (no email support), you have two alternatives:

• Set the folder as a Dropbox input folder - indecs picks up new files automatically.
• Use batch-scan.sh to process the folder from the command line, or wire it into a Hazel rule so new files are picked up as they land. See the shell scripts section.

3. Decide how to feed it

One document per scan is best. Each email (or upload) becomes one job with one AI-generated summary. If you scan a single 3-page invoice as one PDF, you get one clean summary of that invoice.

If you scan a whole stack as a single PDF - a mortgage document, three insurance letters and a receipt, all in one file - you get one summary that jumbles all four together, because the model sees them as one document.

The fix is separate files, one email. If you attach several PDFs to a single email (or select multiple files in a folder upload), indecs treats each attachment as its own document with its own summary, and gives the group a shared collection title - for example "Personal Tax Returns 2009-2013" - for the email subject. Set your scanner to produce one PDF per document, and attach them together, rather than scanning to one long file.

ZIP archives work the same way: if you zip several files and send the ZIP, it's automatically extracted and each supported file inside is processed as its own document.

4. What arrives

A forwarded email looks like this - the metadata indecs extracted, the summary and the original file attached with a clean name:

This is a representative rendering built from the actual forwarding template (see src/services/email-processor.ts) - the exact layout depends on your email client. If you're setting this up for the first time, your own first forwarded email is the real proof.

5. What it cost

That scan was 3 pages, so it used 3 of your 100 free pages this month. A page is one PDF page or one image - a 40-page contract costs 40 pages, a single photo costs 1. See what counts as a page for the full table.

6. Turn on the good settings

These are off by default and make the workflow above actually work. On a paid plan, go to Settings and turn on:

• Rename attachments - files come back named after their AI-generated title instead of scan0001.pdf.
• Date in filename - appends the document's date to the filename, so files sort chronologically in Finder or Explorer.
• Max attachments per email: 1 (one email per document) - if you routinely batch-scan multiple documents into one email, this splits them into separate forwarded emails instead of one combined one.

These three settings are Plus-plan features and have no effect on the free plan - see free plan restrictions.

7. Where to go next

• Connect Dropbox or Notion as a folder or database watch, instead of email.
• scan.sh and batch-scan.sh for a Hazel rule or command-line batch processing.
• The API if you want to build your own upload flow.
• Billing for plans, page allowances and what happens when you run out.