Most work still arrives by email: a booking typed into the body, a website enquiry, a client chasing a delivery. Email intake reads that mail for you, so your team stops copying addresses and dates out of Outlook and into jobs.
Connecting your mailbox
An owner or admin goes to Settings, Integrations and clicks Connect a mailbox on the Microsoft 365 email panel, then signs in with Microsoft. If your organisation only lets an administrator approve new apps, Microsoft will say so; whoever manages your Microsoft 365 can connect it or approve Loaditude.
If the account you connect belongs to a person and your bookings go to a shared address such as sales@, enter that address under Only read emails sent to. Loaditude then reads only mail sent to it and never the person's own email. It looks in every folder except Junk and Deleted Items, so mail your Outlook rules file away is still found. It can read, never send or delete.
Letting it draft the work
Tick Let Scout read these emails and draft the work on the mailbox. Each conversation is then read as a whole, because the details of a job usually arrive over several replies, and sorted into:
- Booking: from one of your clients, it becomes a draft request in your Requests queue with the collection, delivery, dates and items filled in, and your team gets the usual alert. Nothing goes live until someone approves it.
- Enquiry, needs a price: shown on the Email intake page with everything picked out and a list of what is still missing to price it.
- About an existing job: chasers, changes and problems, flagged with the references and postcodes that identify the job.
- Not a job: suppliers, invoices and everything else, kept out of the way.
Scout is Loaditude's assistant. Your emails are never used to train any models, and Scout is off until you turn it on.
The Email intake page
Open it from the panel with See emails read. Each conversation shows what it is, a short summary, the client it was matched to, and the details found. You can change the client, make a draft request yourself (for example for a sender who is not set up as a client yet), or mark it dealt with or not relevant.
Clients are matched by the sender's email address or company domain, so keep your clients' email addresses up to date on their records.
Where to go next
- Client portal features covers requests your clients raise themselves, which land in the same queue.
- Quotes and rate cards covers pricing an enquiry.