Billing

Email Onboarding

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Email onboarding enables you to send Tabs’ invoices, dunning reminders, and other collections emails from the billing address your team manages AR through, and brings every customer reply back into Tabs where both your team and the Collections Agent can act on it.

We recommend using an existing billing group address (e.g. billing@yourcompany.com or ar@yourcompany.com) as the address Tabs sends from. If you don’t have one, create one before you start. A group address is worth the setup: several people can work the same replies, adding teammates later takes a click, and the address outlives whoever configured it.

Who needs to be involved in onboarding and why

WhoWhy we need them
FinanceChooses the address and display name your customers will see on every invoice.
Email admin (likely IT)Creates the group if you don’t have one, allows customers outside your company to email it, and adds the unique Tabs address as a group member. Needs admin rights in Google Workspace or Microsoft 365.
DNS contact (likely IT)Adds the records that authorize Tabs to send as your address. You only need to give us their email address — Tabs sends them the records automatically.
Tabs Implementation Manager or CSMRegisters your address as a verified sender, gives you your unique Tabs address to add to the group or as an email to route to, and turns sending on.

Step 1: Set your Contact email

Set this under Settings → Business information.

Once you complete all of the below steps, Tabs will send all emails from this address. Every invoice, reminder, and Collections Agent email goes out from it. Additionally, your contact email will be cc’d to ensure they show up in your group inbox.

Outbound emails from Tabs:

EmailHow your Contact email is used
Invoice sendsCc
Payment reminders, automated and manualCc
Collections Agent emailsCc
Payment confirmationsCc
Failed and pending payment noticesCc
Credit memo appliedCc
Invoice marked as doneCc
Notifications and digestsSent to
Payment method and portal linksNot copied — these go to the customer’s billing contact alone

Your contact email will also show up on the invoice and credit memo PDF, under your company address in the From block.

Step 2: Create the group — can skip to Step 3 if you already have one

Google Workspace

Your admin does this in the Google Admin console, at Directory → Groups.

  1. Create a group using your billing address — billing@yourcompany.com or ar@yourcompany.com.
  2. Under Posting policies, set Who can post to Anyone on the web. Your customers are external senders, and their replies bounce without this.
  3. Turn off Require moderator approval for external senders. Moderation holds customer replies in a queue and delays everything downstream.
  4. Under Email options, set Post replies to to All group members.
  5. Under access settings, allow members from outside your organization. This is what lets you add the Tabs address in Step 5.
  6. Add your AR team as members.

Microsoft 365

Your admin does this in the Microsoft 365 admin center, at Teams & groups → Active teams and groups.

  1. Create a distribution list using your billing address.
  2. In Edit settings, allow external senders to email the group. Your customers are external senders, and their replies bounce without this.
  3. Add your AR team as members.

Confirm the address works before moving on. Send it a message from an outside address, such as a personal Gmail account, and check that it arrives without being held for moderation.

Step 3: Give Tabs the sender details

Send your Implementation Manager or CSM:

  • Sender email address — the group address from Step 2, for example billing@yourcompany.com
  • Display name — what customers see next to the address, for example Acme Finance Team
  • Email provider — Google Workspace or Microsoft 365
  • DNS contact email — whoever administers your domain’s DNS, for example it@yourcompany.com

Step 4: Have your DNS contact add the records

Tabs emails the DNS contact you named in Step 3 with the records that authorize us to send as your address.

Whoever receives that email needs to:

  1. Add the records at your DNS provider or registrar exactly as given, without editing the host names or values.
  2. Reply or confirm once they’re saved.

Tabs then verifies the records on our side. Verification is a hard requirement — until it passes, we cannot send from your address, and invoices continue going out from the Tabs address.

DNS changes propagate on their own schedule, usually within an hour. Verification failing immediately after the records are saved is normal.

Step 5: Add your unique Tabs address to the group so replies come back

Not using a group? Follow the single-inbox instructions further down this step.

Add your Tabs inbound address as a member of the group. Everything that lands in billing@yourcompany.com then lands in Tabs too — replies to invoices and reminders, net-new customer email, payment and portal notifications, etc.

This ensures Tabs is the source of truth for the customer relationship and allows the Collections Agent to work out of the same inbox your team does.

Your account has a unique Tabs address that looks like this: invoices+{hash}@tabsplatform.com. The hash is a short number unique to your instance. This is the email that needs to be added to the group. Ask your Implementation Manager or CSM for yours.

To add the invoices+hash email, you need a Google Workspace admin, or an Exchange administrator on Microsoft

The Tabs address belongs to a domain outside your company, and permission to add an outside address to a group sits with your email administrators. Nobody else can complete this step, including the person who created the group.

Attempting it without the right access fails with “An error occurred” or “A group can’t be added to another group.” The message names the Tabs address, which makes it look like the address is wrong. It isn’t. That error is Google declining the action, and access is the most common reason.

An email administrator is someone who can sign in to the admin console for your provider — admin.google.com for Google Workspace, or the Microsoft 365 admin center — and manage your company’s accounts and settings.

Google Workspace

In the Admin console, open the group from Step 2:

  1. Go to Members → Add members.
  2. Add your invoices+{hash}@tabsplatform.com address.
  3. Set that member’s subscription to Each email. Digest and abridged delivery batch messages together and strip what Tabs needs to match a reply to your account.
  4. Leave the role as Member.

Microsoft 365

The same access requirement applies — this needs a Microsoft 365 administrator, not the group’s owner. Distribution lists can’t take a raw external address as a member, so this is two steps:

  1. Go to Users → Contacts → Add a contact and create a mail contact for your invoices+{hash}@tabsplatform.com address.
  2. Open the distribution list from Step 2, go to Members → View all and manage members → Add members, and add the contact you just created.

If you’re using a single inbox instead

If you are using a single inbox to manage AR, set up forwarding to ensure Tabs can receive emails sent to the inbox.

  • Gmail — in the mailbox’s Settings → Forwarding and POP/IMAP, add your invoices+{hash}@tabsplatform.com address as a forwarding address. Google emails a confirmation code to it; ask your Implementation Manager or CSM to retrieve the code for you. Then choose to forward a copy and keep Gmail’s copy in the inbox.
  • Microsoft 365 — in the admin center under Teams & groups → Shared mailboxes, select the mailbox, edit Email forwarding, and forward to your invoices+{hash}@tabsplatform.com address. The admin center keeps a copy in the mailbox by design.

Forwarding only covers mail coming in. When someone on your team replies to a customer from that inbox, Tabs never sees the reply, so the thread in Tabs looks like the customer was ignored and the Collections Agent works from an incomplete picture. Add your invoices+{hash}@tabsplatform.com address to CC on outbound replies.

Step 6: Tabs turns on sending

With the DNS records verified and the unique Tabs address in place, your Implementation Manager or CSM activates your sender address on our side. Nothing will happen until they do. This last step is not self-serve, so let them know when your side is done.

Further reading