How Gennai Works: Complete Product Walkthrough

Gennai is an AI-powered invoice management and accounting-workflow platform. It captures supplier invoices from your inbox and the other channels where they arrive, extracts and categorizes the data, reconciles your bank statements against those invoices, and exports the records to your accounting software. No manual downloading, no copy-paste, no chasing attachments.

This walkthrough goes through every part of the product: how setup works, what the AI does with each invoice, what you can see in the dashboard, how exports and integrations work, and the features that most users discover only after a few weeks of using it.

If you prefer to watch rather than read, the video at the top of this page covers the full product live. Everything below is the written reference version.

What Gennai does in one sentence: connect your Gmail, Outlook, or IMAP inbox, and Gennai's AI finds your invoices, extracts the data, and sends it to Xero, QuickBooks Online, Holded, Google Drive, OneDrive, or Google Sheets. Setup takes under two minutes.

Step 1: Connecting Your Email

Gennai supports Gmail, Outlook, and any IMAP-compatible email provider. Gmail and Outlook connections use OAuth 2.0, which means you authorize access through Google or Microsoft directly and Gennai never sees your password. The access is read-only: Gennai reads the emails it identifies as invoices, including invoices written in the email body with no PDF attached, but cannot send emails, delete messages, or modify anything in your inbox.

You can connect multiple email accounts from the same dashboard. Invoices arriving across different inboxes (your main account, an accounting@ address, a shared team inbox) all feed into the same unified view. The number of connected inboxes depends on your plan.

Once connected, Gennai starts scanning immediately. The first scan covers your current inbox. You can also trigger a retroactive scan to pull invoices from any past date range, including your full inbox history if needed.

Other ways in: if invoices reach you outside email (paper receipts, suppliers who use messaging apps, files shared by your team), you can send them to Gennai via WhatsApp, Telegram or Slack, forward them to your private Gennai address, or upload them directly, one at a time or in bulk. They land in the same dashboard alongside your email invoices.

Step 2: How the AI Extracts Invoice Data

Gennai checks your connected inboxes for new messages automatically. When it finds an email that contains an invoice, whether as a PDF attachment, an image, or embedded directly in the email body, it extracts the data.

The AI extracts the following fields from every invoice:

No template setup is required. The AI adapts to any vendor format without needing to be configured per supplier. Extraction is not perfect on every document: heavily stylized layouts, low-quality scans and handwritten invoices are the usual edge cases, and you can review and correct any extracted field from the dashboard.

Gennai also runs automatic deduplication. If the same invoice arrives twice (forwarded, re-sent by a supplier, or present in two connected inboxes), Gennai detects it and prevents the duplicate from appearing twice in your records.

Gennai also categorizes each invoice. When your accounting software is connected, it learns from your own previous coding decisions, such as the accounts and tax treatment you used for each supplier, and suggests or prefills the coding for new invoices. You can override any suggestion, and your history is only used within your own account.

For a deeper look at what is happening technically during extraction, the article on how AI actually reads invoices explains the computer vision, OCR, and language model layers involved in the process.

Step 3: The Invoice Dashboard

Once invoices are extracted, they appear in the unified dashboard. This is the central workspace for your team: a searchable, filterable list of every invoice across all connected inboxes.

Search and filters

You can search by vendor name or tax ID, and filter by date range, amount, currency, or custom tags. This makes it straightforward to pull up all invoices from a specific supplier for a quarter, or find every invoice above a certain amount, without scrolling through lists.

Custom tags

Invoices can be tagged with any label you define: department, project, cost center, approval status, or anything else relevant to your workflow. Tags carry through to exports, so your CSV or accounting integration reflects the same categorization.

Custom classification rules

Beyond manual tagging, you can set up rules that automatically classify invoices when they arrive. A rule might say: any invoice from a specific vendor gets tagged as 'Marketing', or any invoice above a certain amount gets flagged for approval. Rules run automatically on every new invoice without any manual action.

Bulk operations

You can select multiple invoices and perform batch actions: export them together, tag them, push them to an accounting integration, or download as PDF. This is useful at month-end or quarter-end when you need to process a large set at once.

Bank reconciliation (beta)

Upload a bank statement as CSV or XLSX and Gennai matches each transaction against the invoices it has already captured. Matched invoices update their payment status, and charges with no invoice behind them show up as missing documents to chase. Gennai does not connect to your bank and never asks for banking credentials.

Step 4: Analytics and Spending Insights

The analytics section of the dashboard shows spending patterns derived from your extracted invoices. Because Gennai has structured data from every invoice (vendor, amount, date, currency, category), it can surface patterns that would otherwise require manual spreadsheet work.

What you can see in analytics:

• What you owe right now: invoices to pay grouped by due date (overdue, due this week, later), with the next ones listed
• Month close: what is still pending in the current month and the last three, such as invoices to review or exports your accounting software rejected
• Spend by month over the last 12 months, compared with the previous month and the same month last year
• Where the money goes: spend by supplier or by account for the month you pick
• What changed: new suppliers, confirmed price changes on regular costs and unusual spend
• Regular costs per month, and the tax on your purchases (VAT, GST or IVA) in the UK, most of the EU, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UAE

Every figure opens the invoices behind it, so you can check any number in one click.

This gives finance teams a real-time view of AP activity without exporting data to a separate tool. Instead of building a spend report manually at the end of the month, the data is already there, updated with every new invoice that lands in the inbox.

Step 5: The AI Assistant

Gennai's AI assistant is not a chat interface. It is an instruction layer that sits on top of your invoice workflow and acts automatically when invoices arrive. You define the rule once, and the assistant executes it every time the condition is met, without any manual input.

The logic is straightforward: if a condition is true, take an action. You write the instruction in plain language and the assistant applies it to every new invoice from that point forward.

Examples of what you can instruct it to do:

• If an invoice arrives from Google, tag it as "Marketing"
• If an invoice arrives from Carrefour, archive it
• If an invoice is above $1,000, flag it for review
• If the vendor is Stripe, tag it as "Payment processing"
• If an invoice has no VAT, tag it as "VAT exempt"

This is different from the manual classification rules in the dashboard: the assistant lets you write the condition in plain language and combine vendor, amount and content in a single instruction. It applies the actions you define to your captured invoices; it is not a general-purpose agent that runs other business processes.

The result is that by the time an invoice appears in your dashboard, it is already classified, tagged, and routed according to your instructions. Your team sees organized data, not raw extractions.

Step 6: Team Members and Accountant Access

Gennai is built for collaboration from the start. You can invite team members and give your external accountant access to the same account, so everyone works from one set of invoices. If you run several companies, each one is organized separately inside Gennai.

Accountant portal

Your accountant gets their own login, so they can review invoices, apply filters and export what they need. This removes the back-and-forth of emailing PDFs to your bookkeeper at month-end: they just log in and pull what they need.

Secure sharing via links

You can also share specific invoice collections via secure links, without requiring the recipient to have a Gennai account. This is useful for one-off sharing with auditors, external reviewers, or clients.

Step 7: Integrations and Export

Getting invoice data out of Gennai is where the automation pays off. Once the AI has extracted and organized everything, you push it wherever your workflow needs it.

Every plan can export to Xero, QuickBooks Online and Holded; from Growth, export to Xero and QuickBooks Online can run automatically. For other systems, the Google Sheets sync keeps a spreadsheet up to date and CSV/XLSX export covers one-off transfers.

Plans and Pricing

Gennai has a free plan and three paid tiers, plus Custom pricing above 750 invoices a month. Every plan includes the same capture, extraction and export; higher tiers add volume, inboxes and automatic export.

Annual billing saves up to 25%. Add-on invoice credits are available and never expire. Full pricing detail at gennai.io/pricing.

Security and Data Handling

Gennai is GDPR compliant and CASA Tier 2 verified through the App Defense Alliance. Data is encrypted in transit with TLS and at rest with AES-256. Gmail and Outlook connections use OAuth 2.0 with read-only mailbox access: no password storage, no ability to send or delete emails.

Your invoice and email data is not used to train generalized AI models and is never sold. Your financial documents are used solely to provide the service. You can delete your data at any time from account settings or by contacting support. The full privacy and security breakdown is covered in the invoice data security guide.

Getting Started

The free plan includes 10 invoices per month with no time limit and no credit card required. Setup takes under two minutes: create an account, connect your Gmail or Outlook via OAuth, and Gennai starts scanning immediately. If you want to pull in historical invoices, trigger the retroactive scan from the dashboard after connecting.

For teams deciding between Gennai and other tools in this category, the invoice management software buyer's guide covers the full evaluation framework. And for a direct comparison with Tailride, one of the closest alternatives, the Gennai vs Tailride comparison covers where the two products overlap and where they differ.