Capture Invoices
Scan your emails for attached PDF invoices to automate your bookkeeping
If you are running your own business you may have to monitor your inbox for new invoices from various service providers and download them for your accountant.
With Ultradox you can automate this task and let Ultradox check your mails for new invoices and move them to the right folder.
Ultradox will then extract the financial information like subtotal, tax and total from the PDF invoice by leveraging the built-in PDF tools to automate your bookkeeping in a Google Sheet.
Invoices in foreign currencies will be converted automatically so that you'll also find the amounts in your own currency in the sheet.
You can scan your emails from the past years to organize your invoices on Google Drive and populate the sheet with all the info from the past years - or you can run the automation on a daily basis to automatically capture new incoming invoices.
Getting started
After you have copied the example to Google Drive, you will find a number of files in the project folder:
Open the project folder on google drive
You will find the Capture Invoices automation that contains the actual program to scan your emails and to perform the required steps to store and track the data.
The Capture Rules app will greatly help you to build rules that tell Ultradox how to track down emails with invoices attached and how to extract the financial data from these invoices.
the Invoices folder will contain the PDF invoices, sorted by year and stored into different subfolders based on your rules.
The Google Sheet Setup contains all the rules that will be applied to track down the emails with PDF invoices attached and to extract the information from the PDF documents.
The Invoices sheet will then track all invoices and will also contain the financial data extracted from the invoices.
Adjust Rules
In order to use the application correctly, you must define your own search criteria so that all emails relevant to you are tracked.
You can enter these rules in the Google Sheet Setup or define your own rules by creating them with the automation Create Rule.
If you create new rules using the automation Create Rule, these rules are ultimately also transferred to the Google Sheet Setup.
Setup
The sheet Setup contains a number of sample rules that are preset for frequently used services. In order for Ultradox to find other incoming invoices and automatically extract the financial information, you need to adjust the rules.
Open the document Setup to define your rules.
Keyword
The keyword is used to load only relevant emails from your inbox. Enter a simple term in the subject line of your email. All emails containing at least one of the keywords in the subject will be loaded and analyzed.
Use few and simple keywords and make sure that all emails with attached invoices are found.
From, To, Subjekt
In the next step, all loaded e-mails are analyzed and checked to see if they match your expression for sender, recipient and subject.
Enter a regular expression to match more complex subjects.
Text
If an email is matching your criteria, the attached invoice will be downloaded and the text is getting extracted from the PDF.
If an expression has been specified in the text column it will be checked if the extracted text is matching the expression.
If the expression is matching (or no expression has been specified) the rule will be applied and the invoice will be captured.
Subtotal, Tax, Total
The columns Subtotal, Tax and Total with a yellow header will be used to extract the financial info from the PDF invoices using regular expressions. The text in the first group (.*) will be extracted.
Tip: Use the Create Rule app to find the correct expressions. The app will provide links to an online regexp service that you can use to test your expressions against the extracted text.
Currency, Language, Country
The following columns are used to specify the currency, language, and country settings in which the extracted numbers exist. This allows Ultradox to recognize foreign currencies and numbers formatted in a country-specific way.
Account, Description
The text in the account and description columns will be simply copied into the invoices sheet if your rule is matching.
This allows you to create an overview in the Google spreadsheet that you can use directly for accounting purposes.
Folder
In the folder column you can specify the name of the subfolder where the PDF invoices matching your rule will be stored.
If the folder does not exist, Ultradox will create it on the fly.
That's it!
Once you have defined the rules by which the emails are tracked and all relevant data is extracted from the invoices, you can start automation and all invoices are automatically collected in the Invoices sheet and the attachments are archived on your drive!
Run
To run the automation open the Ultradox automation Capture Invoices and click on the Run button in the toolbar.
You can adjust the configuration in the first building block to only load emails from a given date range.
Automate
You can use Ultradox to automatically archive and capture your incoming invoices by running the automation Capture Invoices once per day and by checking all emails from the last 24 hours. Make sure that only the emails of the last day are scanned and then activate the timer for daily execution.
Click on the timer in the main toolbar to schedule and repeat the automation once per day.
Questions and Feedback
If you have any comments on this page, feel free to add suggestions right to the Google document that we are using to create this site.
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Last Updated: 3/27/19