Invoice Creation: From Invoice Capture

Audience: Accounting Manager and Invoice Approver (if enabled)

Summary: Reviews how invoices are created through Invoice Capture

This article covers the following topics:

• Uploading an invoice to MineralTree
  • Emailing an invoice
  • Manually uploading an invoice
  • Document Requirements
• Automated data capture 
  
  • Settings
  • What happens during capture? 

Regardless of the method used to create an invoice, invoices sync between MineralTree and the accounting system.

Uploading an invoice to MineralTree

There are a couple ways to upload invoices to MineralTree. Note that each document is limited to 20MB or less.

Emailing an invoice

Every MineralTree company has a unique email address for uploading invoice documents. When someone (e.g. a vendor or Accounting Manager) sends a document to this email address, it will automatically upload into the Inbox of the MineralTree platform for Accounting Managers to process. Accounting Managers can find this unique email address by navigating to Company Profile by clicking your initials on the top right of the navigation bar. The email address is viewable on the Settings tab of the Company Profile screen. If you use this option, you should not send the invoice in using the BCC function on your email. 

Manually uploading an invoice

Invoices can be uploaded directly into the MineralTree Inbox. 

Once in the Inbox, click on the + sign on the top right and upload your document. 

Document Requirements

There are restrictions on what files can be sent into MineralTree via email to ap-docs.com.  Please keep these in mind and review these factors if a document you submitted does not reach your inbox.

• Total file size per email: The sum of files submitted per email can be no greater than 50 MB
• Invoice lines: MineralTree will only capture 100 invoice lines. If it's over 100, it will provide header level capture only.  
• Individual file size: Individual attached files can be no greater than 20MB.
• Filename length: A filename may not exceed 128 characters including its file extension. For example, the PDF file “invoice” has a total length of 11 characters (Add seven characters for “invoice” plus four characters for “.pdf”).
• The following document types are supported:
  • .csv
  • .doc/.docx
  • .ppt/.pptx
  • .xls/.xlsx
  • .gif
  • .jpeg or .jpg
  • .ods
  • .odt
  • .pdf
  • .png
  • .rtf
  • .txt
  • .zip (so long as the contained files match any of the above file types)

Note: If using bulkdocs, the bulkdocs inbox cannot process emails containing documents totaling more than 25MB. The limit of 20MB per individual document still applies.

Automated Data Capture

Automated data capture eliminates the majority of data entry associated with invoice creation. During Invoice Capture, a few things are happening based on your company's settings.

Capture Settings

Header vs Line & Header Capture. Before implementing, your organization determined if invoices should capture each individual line and its coding or a summary/header level of that information. If line-level was chosen each individual line would be able to be coded differently once capture completes. If header-level, then the entire invoice must be coded the same. 

If line-level is chosen, you can select Header for specific vendors as desired in the Vendor Profile. 

Items vs Expenses. During implementation your organization determines if capture should be completed using items or expenses. This can also be adjusted on the vendor level in the same way as line vs header. 

What happens during capture? 

When you submit an invoice into the system, it kicks off the data capture process. This process takes 24 hours and the invoices goes through OCR (optical character recognition) and a human review process bringing the accuracy of capture to 99.5%. If utilizing bulkdocs, this timeframe is increased by 24 another hours. This is how it works.

1. Information you can expect to be captured includes: 
   • Due date
   • Vendor Name
   • Net Amounts
   • Descriptions
   • PO Number (if applicable)
2. Once the vendor name is captured, if they exist in MineralTree, it will look into the vendor's Invoice Preferences to determine the coding you set and populate those fields automatically. For more details on capture logic, view Invoice Capture Vendor Logic. 
3. If applicable, we will kick off the PO Match algorithm if you have PO Matching enabled

Users can override the capture process at any time by electing to manually enter the data or attach the document to invoice data that already exists.

Once capture completes, the invoices will appear on the Invoices Tab where you can choose to review, post, pay, or detach the documents.

If invoices fail to capture, they will show that on the inbox page. If you would like to be notified of extracture failures via email, please contact customer support. We can configure it so Administrators, Accounting Managers, or both user roles receive email notifications of any invoice extractions that failed from capture. 

Invoices created via the automated data capture process are saved in a draft status, and must be reviewed by users for completeness before they are posted to the accounting system. Once an invoice has been posted to the accounting system, the invoice is available for payment.