How your organisation inbox handles emailed invoices

Attachments Sumext will accept

Email capture accepts PDF, PNG, JPG or JPEG, Word .docx, and Excel .xlsx or .xls files, up to 10 MB per attachment. Legacy .doc files, password-protected or encrypted PDFs, and other file types must be converted first. Each valid attachment becomes its own document, so an email carrying three invoices creates three review items.

Small images and images referenced inside an email signature are filtered as likely logos or tracking assets. Duplicate files are identified from their contents rather than their filename, which prevents the same attachment from being created again simply because a forwarded copy has a new subject line. Body-only receipts can be rendered as a document when that setting is enabled and the message is classified as a receipt; ordinary correspondence does not become a cost.

What happens to a forwarded thread

Forwarding preserves more than the supplier's attachment. Sumext records the delivered sender, subject and original message evidence, then sanitises the HTML copy before it can be viewed. Tracking pixels and unsafe markup are removed. The classifier can use the subject, readable body text and attachment names to distinguish an invoice, receipt, credit note, statement or unrelated file.

The quoted conversation is context, not a set of accounting line items. Sumext processes valid attachments present in the delivered email, ignores signature artwork, and does not turn every reply in a long chain into a separate transaction. If the same invoice appeared earlier in the organisation, content-based duplicate checking stops a second copy. This makes forwarding a thread safe without pretending the thread itself is the invoice.

Confidence belongs to individual fields

After classification, extraction assigns confidence to fields such as supplier, invoice number, date, subtotal, tax and total. It is not a blanket promise that the whole document is correct. Clear printed values and a recognised structure generally score higher; blurred photos, conflicting totals, unusual tax layouts and ambiguous dates score lower. The review screen groups field confidence as high, medium or low and highlights uncertain values for attention.

Email classification has its own confidence score. If classification is unavailable, supported attachments still route conservatively to Costs rather than disappearing. Review the underlying document whenever a value is uncertain. The approval rules guide explains how Team and Firm workspaces add owner or admin sign-off.

Why email never posts straight to the ledger

An email address is intentionally easy to send to. That makes it useful for capture but unsuitable as authority to change the books. A supplier can resend an old invoice, a staff member can forward the wrong company's document, and an email rule can catch a statement or quote. Sumext therefore lands emailed documents in review, where a person confirms the extracted fields and accounting treatment before publishing.

This boundary also keeps an inbox rule from becoming an uncontrolled posting rule. Vendor learning can pre-fill familiar coding, but the source channel remains visible and the reviewer can correct it. See the broader email capture workflow for how sender rules and body receipts fit around this control.

Troubleshoot a missing email

1. Compare the recipient with the address currently shown in the correct organisation. A copied address for another workspace routes there instead.
2. Open Email Capture activity. A rejected or ignored entry usually names the cause: capture is off, the plan does not include it, a sender rule blocked it, the monthly document limit was reached, every file was a duplicate, or the attachment was unsupported, empty, too small or over 10 MB.
3. If the message appears but created no document, inspect its attachment list and classification. An owner or admin can use Process anyway for a legitimate item that was filtered conservatively.
4. If there is no activity row, confirm the sending mailbox shows a successful send, remove any mistyped recipient, attach the original file to a fresh message and retry. Then contact support with the send time, sender and subject, but do not email confidential documents to support unless requested through a secure channel.

Retention and deletion

Sumext stores the original email evidence in private storage alongside a structured record and a sanitised HTML copy. Access to the original uses a time-limited signed link. Created documents follow the organisation's normal document history.

There is no single published retention period for every category of email data. Sumext retains data for as long as needed to provide the service, meet legal requirements, resolve disputes and enforce agreements; backups may remain for a limited technical window. The privacy policy is the controlling statement. An organisation that needs deletion or has a sector-specific retention obligation should contact support and keep its own statutory accounting records.