Invoices by email: from the inbox to the ERP, hands off
A dedicated address like invoices@yourcompany.com, or a label on the mailbox you already use. The rest of the mail is untouched, and the invoices go through on their own.
The invoices arrive. Someone still has to type them.
Supplier invoices reach almost every company the same way: as an attachment in somebody's inbox. From there a person opens each one, reads the supplier, the date, the total and the line items, and types them into the accounting system or the ERP. Then files the PDF somewhere, so it can be found again.
None of those steps needs a person. All of them need a decision about how the invoices get in.
Two ways in, and the difference matters
A dedicated address
Create something like invoices@yourcompany.com and tell your suppliers to use it. Everything that lands there is an invoice, by definition, so nothing has to be sorted. It is the cleaner option, and the slower one to adopt: suppliers change addresses when they feel like it, and some never will.
A label on the mailbox you already have
Keep the address people already use, and mark the invoices with a label or folder. Whatever carries the label gets processed; the rest of the mailbox is untouched. It works from day one, with no supplier to convince, and it costs one rule in the mail client.
Which one to pick: if your suppliers already send to one shared address, use the label. If you are setting up a process from scratch, or you want the invoices out of a personal inbox, use the dedicated address. Both can run at the same time.
What happens after the email
The attachment is read: supplier, tax number, dates, totals, and each line with its quantity, unit price and tax rate. The body of the email is ignored, because it is where people write things that are not the invoice.
Then the part that decides whether any of this survives contact with reality: what happens when the reading is wrong. Some checks need no knowledge of your business. Line items have to add up to the printed total, to the cent. The same file submitted twice is a duplicate. A date in the future on a purchase invoice is a date read wrong.
What does not add up stops and waits for a person. What does, goes through.
And then it goes somewhere
The extracted data is only useful where the work happens: your accounting system, a spreadsheet, an archive folder organised by supplier and month, or several of those at once. The document ends up filed where whoever needs it already looks for it, rather than in a folder invented by the automation.
What this does not do
It does not post the entry for you. It does not decide which account a cost belongs to. It does not replace the person who reviews. What it removes is the typing, the sorting and the filing, which is where the hours go and where the mistakes come from.
See it on your own documents
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