What is AP Automation?
Updated over a week ago

Goal:

The following article explains the Procurify invoice inbox feature.

The AP Automation features an invoice inbox and a unique email address that receives invoice emails into Procurify. The attached invoices are automatically converted into Bills which the Accounts Payable (AP) team can later review and pay. Contact your Procurify representative if you want this feature enabled in your account.


How does it work?
Users accessing the Manage Bills page can easily copy a system-generated email address to receive invoice emails. This email is unique to their domain, non-guessable, and read-only. The Inbox email address can be copied from the Manage Bills page (See the image below). Access the Manage Bills page by completing the following steps:

  1. On the left-hand navigation bar, select the Accounts Payable tab.

  2. Select Manage Bills

  3. Click on the icon beside the Inbox email.

OCR.PNG

AP teams can use the Inbox feature in one of such ways:

  1. Vendors can send invoice emails to a shared AP team email address, and the AP team forwards each email to the Inbox email address.

  2. AP team instructs each vendor to send invoice emails directly to the Inbox email address.

We recommend option 1 to reduce changes to existing processes and make it easy to communicate with vendors. Once an email is in the invoice Inbox, any email attachments will also populate in Procurify. For each file, Procurify applies Optical Character Recognition Technology and creates a Draft Bill with the file attached, with the “Created By” specified as “Procurify Inbox.”

Each invoice will be parsed to extract the following invoice header information:

  • Invoice Number

  • PO Number

  • Vendor Name

  • Due Date

  • Invoice Date

Please note the following:

  • Accepted File Types: Only PDF, JP(E)G, PNG files

  • Limit of 25MB per file

  • Limit of 10 attachments per email. A draft bill will be automatically created for each attachment.

  • Only email attachments will be accepted, not in-line images

  • PO numbers are not detected if they contain an underscore (_).

Frequently Asked Questions

If I enable an auto-forwarding rule to my existing AP email address/inbox and have it auto-forward to my PF invoice inbox, will that work or will it break any of our automation?

Yes, it will work.

If an invoice is forwarded to my PF invoice inbox and does not find an associated Purchase Order in PF, will AP Automation create a draft bill?

Yes, it will create a draft bill even if there is no Purchase Order in Procurify.

If no items have been received, how will AP Automation process the invoice?

If you are using our legacy AP module, a bill draft will be created, but the AP automation will not be able to match it against a PO and populate the Bill Form since no receiving has occurred in Procurify.

Will the system continuously try to read the invoice and try to match purchase orders?

No, AP Automation will only process the invoice upon receipt.

If an invoice contains multiple Purchase Order numbers, what is the expected behavior?

Our OCR will only pick up one PO number and associate one PO, the client can then choose other corresponding POs from the Draft Bill stage to pull in additional line items associated with the invoice.

What happens when more than one attachment is sent to the invoice email address?

Our platform will create one draft bill for every attachment sent in an email, even if all attachments are sent in one email together. Please note there is a limit of 10 attachments per email.

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