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5-minute quick start ​

Upload your first document, watch the engine extract its fields, fix anything wrong, and approve. Five minutes. Works whether your project is brand-new or already in production.

This page assumes you have an account and access to at least one project. If you don't yet, see Account setup.

Before you start ​

You'll need:

  • A sample document in PDF, PNG, or JPEG. An invoice works well — Recognito's default models are tuned for it. A real invoice from a vendor you actually use gives a more realistic first run than a synthetic test file.
  • Access to a project. Your admin invited you to one; you'll see it on the Dashboard when you sign in.

Step 1 — Open the project ​

Sign in at app.recognito.io. The Dashboard lists every project you have access to in your current organization. Click the project you want to use.

You land on the Documents view — a table of every document currently in the project. If the project is new, it's empty.

Step 2 — Upload the document ​

Click Upload new files in the top-right of the toolbar. The upload modal opens with two paths:

  • Drag-and-drop — drop your file into the picker, or click to browse. Batch limit is 70 MB.
  • Email — every project has its own inbox address (invoice-randomstring@mail.recognito.io for Invoice projects). Forward documents there and they show up in the queue. Useful for forwarding rules and supplier-direct emails.

For your first document, drag-and-drop is fastest. Drop the file in and close the modal.

The document appears at the top of the table with Document Status Processing and Approval Status Pending. Extraction takes anywhere from a few seconds to a minute or two depending on document complexity.

Long documents pause for confirmation

If your document has more pages than the project's auto-scan threshold (default: 5), Document Status becomes Needs action instead of Processing. Open the document, click Process, and pick which pages to actually scan. This avoids accidentally running a 200-page PDF through OCR.

Step 3 — Open the document in Studio ​

When Document Status flips to Done, click the document's row. Studio opens.

Studio has three panes:

  • Left — the document preview with colored bounding boxes drawn over each extracted value. Each color matches a field category.
  • Right — the extracted fields, grouped by category: Main on top, then Payment, Tax, Metadata.
  • Bottom — the line items table.

The first time you open a document, scan the fields top to bottom. Most should be filled in. A handful of Metadata fields may show —Not set— — that's normal; those fields wait for Mapping rules or your manual input.

Step 4 — Verify and correct ​

Click any field to edit it. The value updates in place. Common things to check:

  • Vendor name and tax ID — these flow into your downstream system, so getting them right matters.
  • Invoice total — the most-watched field; misreads here cause real problems.
  • Due date — sometimes the engine picks up the wrong date if the document shows several.
  • Line items — scan the table for misread quantities, prices, or amounts.

If a field shows —Not set— and is mandatory, the Validate button stays disabled until you fill it in. This is the system's way of preventing incomplete documents from moving forward.

Edits trigger Mapping rules automatically

When you change a field that has a workflow watching it — a vendor name, a department code, a total amount — the related lookups re-run. Pick a different vendor and the GL code, payment terms, and approver list update on their own. No need to click anything else.

Step 5 — Validate and approve ​

When every mandatory field has a real value and the data looks right, click Validate in the top-right of Studio. Approval Status flips to Validated. The document leaves your queue if you're filtering by My tasks.

What happens next depends on your project's setup:

  • No approver groups configured — you can click Approve directly. Approval Status flips to Approved. Done.
  • Approver groups configured — the document routes to the configured approvers. Their Approve button is the one that flips the status; yours stops at Validate.

Once the document is Approved, any configured outbound integration — webhook, ERP push, scheduled export — fires automatically.

What just happened ​

In the background, three things ran:

  1. Extraction — OCR plus machine learning read the document and populated the field values you saw in Studio.
  2. The Initial Workflow — your project's Initial_Workflow ran vendor lookups, GL coding, approver routing, and any other first-pass enrichment configured for the project.
  3. Field-change workflows — every time you edited a field with a workflow watching it, the relevant lookups re-ran.

Everything you saw in Studio is the cumulative result of those three things.

What's next ​