AP - Invoice Inbox

Please note: Only customers who have enabled Teampay’s AP capabilities can use the invoice inbox functionality. if you’re interested in learning more about AP, contact your Customer Success Manager.

Setting up Invoice Inbox

The invoice inbox gives your organization a single place to receive and review all invoices and supporting documents in one place, with unlimited storage!

When setting up your invoice inbox, simply navigate to the Inbox tab, under Payables. There, you’ll see the ability to “Activate invoice inbox”.

After activation, you should see your invoice inbox’s email address under “Inbox Address”. We do not currently allow you to change this email address. If you would like to choose a different email address for vendors to send invoices to, we recommend setting up a forwarding address; this will allow you to create a custom email address without losing any of the inbox functionality.

In the settings page, you can elect to include the email body text when an invoice is received. The email body text will appear in the inbox as a second PDF attachment, behind the actual invoice document.

Forwarding address

We recommend setting up a forwarding address so you can keep track of all emails sent to the invoice inbox. If a vendor sends an invoice in a format that we can’t read (i.e. ZIP file), or the email does not contain an attachment, the forwarding email address will retain the email, ensuring that no invoices or context are lost.

To do this, go to your email client, create a new address, and auto-forward all emails to the email address which we provide for you.

Receiving invoices

The inbox can read emails in various formats and quality. Teampay can process any image or PDF file that is attached to an email.

Invoices that are created via uploading the invoice directly to Teampay, whether in the “Bills” tab or in the “Inbox” tab, will also appear in the invoice inbox.

Attachments with obscure file types and emails without attachments will not appear in the invoice inbox. This is one of the reasons why we recommend setting up a forwarding address for your inbox.

If multiple attachments are sent in an email, each attachment will be processed as a separate draft bill in the inbox.

Processing invoices

Each invoice that is sent to the invoice inbox will be processed using OCR processing, automatically extracting information and populating the relevant fields in Teampay. Before continuing to process and pay each invoice, we recommend double-checking the auto-populated fields to ensure that the OCR fields are 100% accurate, and making small adjustments if necessary.

Once an invoice is received in the inbox, you will see it appear in the “pending action” state.

If you click on “Review”, you then have the option to either match the invoice to an existing purchase order (PO - see the button “Search for an existing PO”), create a new purchase order (Request Approval), or reject the invoice.

When matching, we will scan through all existing purchase orders (only purchase orders that are approved will show up here!) and present those that most closely match the information on the invoice. If you don’t see the correct purchase order appear, you can easily search for the correct one without leaving the page. Once you match to an existing PO, a bill will be created, and the invoice will disappear from the inbox. Note: you cannot match an invoice to a purchase order if they have different vendors.

For Netsuite and Quickbooks customers:

See this article for processing bills without purchase orders

For Intacct customers:

If you choose to “request approval”, the system will generate a new purchase request for a PO. Before submitting, you will be prompted to code the request and assign a Teampay user as the requestor. This new purchase request will then be routed through the usual approval chain for that assigned user. The requestor may be set to anyone in the Teampay application, allowing you to send the request from the appropriate user!

Once this request is approved, the invoice will appear as “Matched” in the invoice inbox, under the “All” tab.

If you click into a matched invoice, you will be able to click through to the PO that is pending approval. If the invoice should instead be matched to another existing PO, you can easily choose “Select Another PO”.

If the PO is approved, a bill will be created and the invoice will disappear from the inbox. If the PO is rejected, the invoice will return to the “pending action” state.

If you reject the invoice, you will be prompted to enter a reason, which will then show on the history of the invoice (you can always restore the invoice later).

If you would like to send a notice of the rejected invoice directly to the vendor, simply select the box labeled "Send a rejection email to vendor". The email will be sent to the vendor that originally sent the invoice to the inbox and will look something like this:

Testing

We recommend forwarding at least one test invoice to the inbox before giving vendors the go-ahead.

SmartMatch

SmartMatch is automatically enabled with Invoice Inbox and allows suggestions for POs that may match a draft bill.

On the Draft Bill detail view, if a Draft Bill is not linked to a purchase request, purchase order, or bill, the system may find a similar PO and suggest it as a match. Up to 5 POs may be suggested as a match for a single draft bill.