Streamline your accounts payable workflow with the AP Inbox feature, designed to eliminate the hassle of manual data entry and accelerate bill processing. By setting up a dedicated email address, you can effortlessly forward vendor bills as PDF attachments directly to SoftLedger, where AI takes over—intelligently scanning and extracting key details like invoice numbers, dates, amounts, and vendor information to automatically populate a new AP bill in your system for review and confirmation.
This AP Inbox not only saves valuable time but also minimizes errors, ensuring your financial records remain accurate and up-to-date, while attaching the source document to the softledger bill automatically.
See an overview of setup and bill creation from the AP Inbox here:
Inbox Setup
The first step is to create the email address where PDFs will be sent to for the bill creation. You can add this email under the System section under Settings.
Best Practice Guidance:
Choose a prefix that's short, easy to remember, and unique to the organization
Consider vendor-friendly prefixes such as the company name or "ap-[company]"
Share the dedicated AP Inbox address with vendors (or, forward emails from vendors to this email address)
Instruct vendors to send bills to that address with PDF attachments for best results
How it works
An email with a PDF is received at the specified email address.
AI processes the PDF to populate the fields for the softledger bill to be created.
Non-PDF attachments are filtered out.
Each email sent to the designated email address is tagged in softledger with a system job id for easy tracking and review.
Bills are reviewed individually or in bulk by softledger users to confirm/adjust the inputs to the bill from AI before bill submission (where bills are submitted in Created status for further review if necessary).
The bill number is tied to the email system job id in a table within the AP Inbox section, which displays statuses for each email of
Pending,Processed,Rejectedbased on the outcome of the bill processing.
Technical Details
Vendor creation
The AI processing will attempt to match the vendor name from a PDF received against the existing vendor names within softledger, but if it cannot find a match, a new vendor will be created from the vendor name on the PDF.
Ledger Account selection
The AP Account on the created AP bill in softledger will be pulled from the default AP Account set under Settings>Accounts. The Expense account(s) will be selected based on AI reviewing the line items and best matching the appropriate expense account based on the context.
Location selection
The location added to the AP bills created from the PDF will default to the softledger global location.
Currency selection
AI will attempt to locate a currency code on the PDF, but if not, default to USD as the currency of the softledger AP bill.
Troubleshooting
In addition to the AP Inbox table, users can review more technical details for the email received under the Admin>System Jobs section that captures the sender, date, and can list information on any failures.
Best Practices
Instruct vendors to use PDF files only when sending vendor invoices.
Only include one PDF per email.
Bill PDFs should clearly display bill number, date, vendor, and totals.
Standard text-based PDFs work better than scanned images or photos.