Set up the Yokoy invoice inbox for receiving invoices

🌐 Web | 👤 Yokoy admin with Invoice settings permission

Yokoy lets you automatically upload invoices by sending an email to a dedicated inbox.

When Yokoy receives emails in the dedicated inbox, it processes the email and/or attachment(s) and uploads them as invoices.

The Yokoy invoice inbox address has a specific format <customerName>@invoices.yokoy.ai, where customerName can be any string (but must be unique within Yokoy). This email address is used to identify the specific organization and legal entity to which the invoice must be uploaded. Any emails from addresses that do not exactly match this address are rejected.

Yokoy accepts emails sent with the invoice inbox address in the to or cc attributes. Any emails sent with the invoice inbox address in the bcc fields are not processed.

As an organization, you may not want to provide this inbox address directly to your suppliers. In this case, you have two options:

Set up email forwarding in your company mail server
Configure an email alias in Yokoy to recognize email addresses from other domains

Configure the Yokoy invoice inbox address

During implementation, Yokoy will have set up a dedicated invoice inbox for your company. You can view the address in Admin > Invoice settings, Company email.

Usually the email address has this format: yourCompanyName@invoice.yokoy.ai.

You can change the prefix (i.e. yourCompanyName) of this inbox if necessary, but the domain must remain the same.

🚧 Caution

The prefix must be unique to your organization and company.
If you try to enter a prefix that is already being used by another organization, you‘ll see an error and cannot save the form.

Set up email forwarding

If you want suppliers to use an email address within your own domain to send your company invoices, you can set up forwarding in your mail server to ensure that any emails sent to that address are automatically forwarded to the dedicated Yokoy invoice inbox.

For example, if you use Exchange as a mail server and Yokoy has set up the invoice inbox companyA@invoices.yokoy.ai in the Yokoy app, you need to set up a forwarding rule from your Exchange mail server to forward any email from invoices@companyA.com to companyA@invoices.yokoy.ai.

In this case, it is important that the to address of any emails is set to the Yokoy invoice inbox address. Otherwise, Yokoy will reject the email as it is unable to identify the organization and legal entity to which it belongs.

Configure an email alias

Some mail servers do not change the to address of the emails it forwards for security reasons. This makes it impossible for Yokoy to determine the legal entity that the email is intended. For example, an email is received for companyA@invoices.yokoy.ai, but the to address is still invoices@companyA.com, Yokoy doesn’t know where the email comes from and discards the email instead of uploading it to the incorrect organization.

Yokoy allows you to set up email aliases. This means that when Yokoy receives an email from invoices@companyA.com, it can find the correct Yokoy invoice inbox.

For security reasons, Yokoy needs to make sure that you own this email address so you cannot get invoices from another organization. To do this, Yokoy performs a DNS verification check on the domain.

Domain verification is performed by organization and domain. For example, once you verify invoices@companyA.com, you can add invoices-belgium@companyA.com without an extra verification step, even in other legal entities. However, other domains do need a new DNS record to perform verification (i.e. invoices@belgium.companyA.com is considered another domain).

To set up an alias:

Go to Admin > Invoice settings, Company email.
First add an alias to the email settings. This should be the email you give to your suppliers. For example, invoices@companyA.com.
When you save, you see a notification that the domain is unverified and provide a banner with a verification code. For example, Add yokoy-domain-verification=26e2e19b4fcefa0bb6c5c2497f97710ee4334fe726bbbc0a421723f92bf8b2a8 to your DNS files.
Ask this to the TXT DNS records. The DNS to add is the yokoy-domain-verification=XXX part of the info banner.
Once this is done, you need to trigger the verification manually in the app by clicking the Verify email button.
Once verified, the alias becomes disabled and cannot be changed anymore for security reasons. You can always remove the alias and add another one if you made a mistake.
Once the new alias is verified, it is then considered for incoming emails. Send a new test email to check that it works.

✏️ Note

DNS record updates can take up to an hour to propagate based on your DNS settings.

🚧 Caution

You still need to configure your mail system to forward the emails to the Yokoy email address (companyA@invoices.yokoy.ai). Yokoy does not have access to the customer’s mail server and can only receive emails sent to Yokoy addresses. The email alias means that if another email address appears in the To address, Yokoy can still process it correctly.