Today, the Inbox and workflows

Cortex does part of the work before anyone asks: the offices check the books every morning and prepare the routine entries, reminders and memos. Nothing they prepare changes your books until a person accepts it in the Inbox.

The daily checks

Every morning at 07:00 India time the offices run five checks on each workspace:

• Bill check — a bill that looks like a duplicate or is far above the supplier’s usual, a GST rate unlike their other bills, input credit claimed on a bill not addressed to the company, GST charged by a supplier with no GSTIN on record, and TDS to withhold when you pay.
• Compliance due — filings coming due and overdue on the calendar.
• Receivables — invoices past due, by customer and age, with a reminder drafted for each.
• Payroll check — gaps and differences in the month’s payroll.
• Stalled deals — deals that have not moved, when your CRM is connected.

Early each month the AI Controller’s month-end close review also runs by itself for the month just ended. What each check finds is stored as a finding with an owner and an action, and is marked resolved when a later run no longer finds it. Thresholds — such as how many days overdue before a reminder — are set under Settings → Office settings.

The Today page and the morning brief

Today is the first page after you sign in. It shows what the checks found, what is due and what waits for your approval, each section on its own so one slow source never blanks the page. On top, the CEO office writes a brief of up to eight lines. Every figure in it is taken from the checks: a line that quotes a number the checks did not produce is dropped, and without an Anthropic key the brief shows the facts alone and says why.

The approval inbox

Everything the AI prepares — from the offices in chat, the daily checks, a workflow, a bank statement import or an MCP client — arrives in the Inbox as a proposal: a purchase read from a bill, the entry for an unexplained bank line, a payment, a credit note, a new customer or supplier, a filing marked as filed, a reminder or a memo. Each shows the reasoning and the documents behind it.

• Accept it — one at a time or several together — and Books checks it exactly as it checks an entry you type: a duplicate bill or a closed period is refused.
• Reject it with a reason. A bill read from a document opens as the filled-in purchase form instead, so you can correct it before saving.
• Stale proposals expire; a reminder for an invoice paid in the meantime is withdrawn.

The Inbox is for workspace admins and operators. The automation counter in Books shows how much of the month’s entries arrived this way rather than being typed.

Workflows

On the Growth plan and above, Operations → Workflows runs automations of your own. A workflow starts on a schedule (in your time zone) or on an event — a bill entered, a proposal decided, a finding raised — and runs up to ten steps: run one of the office checks, ask an office to write a short note, or propose a memo. Steps that would change something still go to the Inbox.

Starter workflows — checking each new bill, reviewing payroll when it is accepted, a Monday pipeline review — are created switched off, so you read them before turning them on. Every run and every step is recorded; a failed run can be replayed.

Connecting Claude over MCP

Cortex is an MCP server. Under Settings → API keys, create a key for Claude (MCP): Cortex shows the one-line command that adds it to Claude Code, and any MCP client that sends a bearer token connects the same way. Claude then reads your books with the same tools the offices use, and anything it proposes waits in the Inbox like any other proposal. The key is an admin key — keep it like a password, and revoke it from the same screen.