Send an invoice via email

You can send an invoice via email to a specific Yokoy invoice mailbox. The invoice is automatically uploaded to Yokoy for processing. Depending on your company’s settings, how Yokoy handles the email may change.

Yokoy supports these formats via email:

All other formats are considered to be either supporting documents or are ignored.

The Yokoy team will have set up an invoice mailbox to receive invoices for your company in Admin > Invoice settings. The format of the invoice mailbox address includes a custom part defined specifically for your organization or company and always ends with “@invoices.yokoy.ai”.

You can have:

Invoices sent to a generic mailbox for several companies or the entire organization can be moved to the corresponding company automatically. Each generic mailbox is associated with a “default“ company.

Yokoy accepts emails sent to the Yokoy-based email address in the to and cc fields. Any emails sent with the invoice mailbox email address in the bcc field are not processed.

Yokoy uses the recipient email address to determine the organization and company where the invoice should be uploaded. For example, if the email was sent to the invoice mailboxes for two different legal entities in the same organization, the invoice mailbox in the to field takes preference over any invoice mailbox stated in the cc field. If both invoice mailboxes were used in the to field, then Yokoy uploads the invoice to the first one configured. If the invoice mailboxes are from different organizations, the email is not processed.

In addition, Yokoy can use the invoice information to determine whether the invoice belongs to the default company or whether it should be moved to another company. When the Move invoice to company with matching criteria (PO, tax ID, customer name, or address) checkbox has been selected in the invoice settings, Yokoy uses PO, tax ID, customer name, and customer address information on the invoice to determine which company the invoice belongs to:

Yokoy checks progressively against the other companies in the organization to find the matching company where the invoice should be assigned. If it fails to find the matching company, the invoice is not moved from the default company and a warning is triggered in the invoice header. If multiple companies match the invoice, the invoice is not moved from the default company and a warning is triggered in the invoice header.

By default, the user with a registered email address in Yokoy who sends an invoice to the Yokoy invoice mailbox is automatically added as a submitter. Depending on their role for the company, they may or may not be able to further process the invoice.

If the user who sent the invoice is not recognized as a Yokoy user, the invoice is not assigned to any submitter.

In any case, the email from which invoices are received is registered in the invoice header if you hover the cursor over the invoice source.

After you have sent the email containing the invoice to this specific inbox, Yokoy can extract the invoice from the email and import it in your account.

Yokoy ensures the security of your data by scanning all incoming email attachments sent to the invoice mailbox with an industry-standard virus scanner. Any viruses are detected and removed so they do not infect your organization. If an email contains only innocent files, the files are processed as usual.

When an infected file is found, Yokoy quarantines the infected file. To alert you that the sent file was infected, Yokoy generates a replacement text file, which it uploads as a supporting document in the Documents tab of the invoice. The text file contains a generic message that identifies the virus that was detected in the attachment, according to the industry-standard virus scanner’s database.

The name of the text file clearly indicates that the file uploaded contained a virus. It uses the format of the original file name plus virus-report. For example, if a PDF with name purchase-order.pdf is sent to the invoice inbox and an virus is found in this file, a text file named purchase-order.pdf-virus-report.txt is uploaded to the corresponding invoice.

Yokoy does not perform any additional post-filtering on the files received. In other words, it assumed that whatever was submitted via mail is either an invoice or a supporting document. Only PDF files or XML files (i.e. e-invoices) are considered invoices. The maximum number of PDF documents that can be sent via email is restricted by the email provider, not by Yokoy.

By default, Yokoy considers all PDF files to be invoices. If the email doesn‘t contain a PDF, an invoice is created from the email body.

However, you can configure Yokoy to use AI to classify PDF files as either invoices or supporting documents.

Where Yokoy creates the invoice from the email body, the generated invoice preview includes all body content i.e. all text and images in the body of the email. You may find that the layout may change during the conversion to PDF.

The invoice inbox can receive and process digital invoices sent in PDF and XML formats such as XRechnung, ZUGFeRD and Peppol BIS 3.0.

If e-invoices are sent via email in XML and PDF format, Yokoy can recognize whether PDF invoice document and the e-invoice XML file contain the same information (i.e. represent the same invoice), Yokoy merges the two invoices into a single entry. The XML file is used as primary data source and the PDF is used solely for invoice representation. In such cases, a log record for the merge action is created in the history log of the invoice record.

If documents (DOC, DOCX, etc.), spreadsheets (XLS, XLSX, etc.), or other files (CSV) are attached to the email, these files are uploaded as supporting documents in the Documents tab in Yokoy. If the email includes images (PNG, JPG, GIF, etc.) or other file types (TXT, etc.) as attachments, these files are ignored.

Depending on your company settings, Yokoy can also import the email body as supporting document, provided the invoice has been attached to the email as a PDF. In this case, the generated PDF document is automatically linked to the invoice report, and displayed in the Documents tab.

When suppliers send invoices via email, they may include other PDF files such as statements, timesheets, or other project information.

You can configure Yokoy AI to correctly identify and classify these documents. Instead of handling them as if they were another invoice, Yokoy uploads them as supporting documents, attaching them to the main invoice.

When document classification is enabled for the company, Yokoy AI analyzes any PDF documents sent to the invoice mailbox and classifies them as one of the following categories:

Once classified, Yokoy processes the document as either an invoice (i.e. creates a new invoice in Yokoy) or a supporting document (i.e. attaches the file to an existing invoice in Yokoy).

If the email contains multiple PDF attachments in which Yokoy AI detects more than one invoice, Yokoy creates an invoice for each invoice document PDF detected and uploads all the other PDF attachments classified as supporting documents to all invoices created from the email.

If Yokoy AI detects only supporting documents in the email, but no invoice documents, Yokoy creates an invoice from the email body.

Where the email contains both XML and PDF attachments, Yokoy AI classifies the PDF documents as either invoices or supporting documents.

You can determine how Yokoy processes the document classifications in the invoice settings.

To allow Yokoy to correctly identify and process PDF files received via email, you need to enable document classification at company level by turning on the Document classification toggle switch.

Once enabled, you can determine how you want Yokoy to process each category:

You can either classify the attachment type as:

If Yokoy receives an invoice that AI identifies as a credit note and document classification is configured to classify credit note email attachments as invoices in Yokoy (i.e. create a new invoice record that is marked as a credit note), Yokoy performs several checks and actions on the resulting credit note.

If the extracted credit note contains a negative total amount, no action is performed. All document data remains the same.

If the extracted credit note contains a positive total amount, Yokoy inverts the sign of the total amount, and inverts the sign of each line item amounts.

In other words:

Sign inversion applies regardless of the document currency. Amounts are not recalculated or adjusted. Only the signs of the existing values are inverted.

This action is only applied to credit notes when the invoice documents are received and classified via email.