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About AP Automation
Dedicated Email Address
AP Automation streamlines bill entry by automatically creating draft bills from bill documents that you email or upload. Sage Intacct automatically identifies the vendor and fills in the bill details for you, attaching the source bill document for reference.
Your Sage Intacct account manager to learn about enabling AP Automation.
How it works
The automated billing process is triggered by the following events:
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You upload bills within Intacct, using the Upload button on the Bills list.
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You forward bills to the email address that we provide, or ask vendors to send bills to the address.
Intacct assigns a unique email address to use for bill automation to each entity in your company and the top level. Learn how to Find your Sage-provisioned email addresses.
For each bill document you submit, the system creates a corresponding Sage Intacct bill in draft state and attaches the original bill document.
Using artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), Intacct fills in bill details, automatically matching vendor information and including:
- Data captured from the uploaded or emailed bill, such as the bill number, date, line items, and amounts
- Details from the vendor record
- GL account and dimension coding, based on your previous coding patterns
- Additional machine learning insights learned from your corrections
When the analysis is complete, AP Automation saves the bill as a draft, ready for you to review and then submit or post.
Curious about the specifics? Learn How AP Automation populates draft bills.
Reviewing and posting incoming bills
Draft bills created using AP Automation appear in the Bills list. When you first load the Bills page, it shows new incoming automated bills. At any time after loading the page, you can select Refresh to see newly arrived bills and updated bill states.
To make reviewing and posting of automated bills easier, use the Draft bills standard view. This view shows all bills with a state of Draft or Analyzing. Because it is a standard list, it includes the Attach icon. Select Attach to open the attachment bill directly from the list.
To view the bill document alongside bill details in view or edit mode, enable Split view in your personal preferences.
As you review the drafts, you might find bills that need more information before you can submit or post them. This is especially true when you first begin processing automated bills, when AI/ML does not yet know your preferences. When you post a bill after a field that AI/ML populated based on a prediction, that information is fed back to the AI/ML system and is used to improve future predictions.
To understand more about how AI/ML improves over time, read How AP Automation uses AI.
Handling import issues
From the Bills list, you can see whether any of the automated draft bills triggered import exceptions. Standard views such as All and Draft bills include columns with information specific to AP automation.
- Source: Shows the service used to receive the bill, either Bill upload or Email
- Import exceptions: Alerts you to issues that need your attention
Import exceptions can be as follows:
- Resolve: You need to take action to complete the bill. For example, if Intacct cannot match the vendor with enough confidence, you need to select the correct vendor. If a problem with the bill document prevents data extraction, you need to edit the bill details or resubmit the bill.
- Duplicate: Intacct detected that this bill is already in the system. To avoid double billing, the system alerts you to the duplicate.
To get details about an exception, hover over the exception in the Import exceptions column. Or, you can view or edit the bill to see details.
For drafts flagged as duplicates, you can view the original bill when you view or edit the duplicate, as long as you did not delete the original. Incoming bills are compared to bills that you previously submitted using AP Automation.
After you edit a bill and either save it as a draft, submit it, or post it, Intacct removes the exception flag.
