Inbox & Messages

How email-to-job triage decides what to suggest

Forwarded email arrives as a draft card at the very top of Triage, above the Triage heading itself, labelled with a count such as “3 awaiting decision”. If nothing is pending, the section does not render at all, so it never takes up space for the sake of it. Accupe shows your 20 most recent pending drafts, newest first, and the list updates live: a forward arriving while you are on the page raises a “New email in triage” toast and the card appears without a refresh.

The matching is keyword and pattern work against the subject line, not an AI model reading your correspondence. The body is not used to make the guess at all: it is carried through as the first 500 characters of summary so you can sanity-check the match without leaving the page. Six categories are recognised, VAT Return, Annual Accounts, Payroll, Bookkeeping, Self Assessment and Confirmation Statement, and the confidence badge reports what matched. High match means both a client and a category, Likely match means one of the two, Low confidence means neither.

Accepting a card creates a real job immediately, using the guessed title, client and category, with status Not Started and a fee of 0, so the real fee still needs setting afterwards. Dismissing discards the draft with nothing created. Because the queue is shared across your firm, a colleague can action a card moments before you do: normally it simply vanishes from your list live, and in the rare collision you get a “Could not handle draft” error rather than a duplicated job.

One thread per client, opened from two places

There is no per-job or per-topic threading here. Every client has exactly one conversation, reachable either from Messages in the sidebar or from the Messages tab on their Contacts record, and both views show the same thread. The list on the Messages page includes every client at your firm, not only the ones you have already written to: clients you have messaged sort first by most recent message, then everyone else alphabetically. Staff see only the clients delegated to them, while admins and managers see every conversation.

Each row carries signals worth reading. A colour-coded initials avatar (the same client keeps the same colour between Messages and Contacts, since both derive it the same way), a green dot when the client is currently active in their portal, an unread dot when the newest message came from them, and an orange “Not on portal” pill when they have never set access up. Read receipts run one way only: the client sees a double checkmark once you have read their message, and you see no delivered or read indicator on your own.

Notifications are part of Triage, not a separate inbox

Accupe has no bell icon with its own list behind it. Notifications sit inside Triage alongside unread client messages, jobs that are overdue or due soon, tasks due soon, signature requests awaiting action and historical AML screenings still awaiting a disposition, with a row of filter pills across the top to narrow to one kind at a time. Only unread notifications appear, so an empty Notifications filter genuinely means you are caught up rather than that something failed to load.

The Tasks filter is the one that behaves differently by role: general staff see only tasks assigned or delegated to them, while admins and managers see every open task due soon across the firm. The other filters already show the same firm-wide list to every role. J and K move down and up the list, Enter opens the highlighted row, and Cmd or Ctrl plus R refreshes on demand, all of which work provided you are not typing in a field at the time.

What people come here to do

• Turn a forwarded email into a job. How the confidence badge is calculated, what Accept actually creates, and when to dismiss instead.
• Message a client. One thread per client from two places, the row signals, read receipts, and the AI draft option.
• Work through everything waiting on you. The seven Triage filters, which of them are scoped to you, and the keyboard shortcuts for clearing a list.

Where to go next

• Client Portal. Messaging can be turned off per client, and a client who has never set up portal access cannot see what you send.
• Practice Management. An accepted email draft becomes a job, which is where its status, fee, assignee and due date are then managed.
• Compliance & KYC. The Compliance filter in Triage lists the historical AML screenings that still need a decision recorded against them.