Business Rule Conditions and Operators

Access. Business Rules is available to three roles. SuperAdmin can create and edit rules. ProcureToPay Manager and ProcureToPay Agent have read-only access. See the Roles and Access Reference.

Overview

A condition is a field, an operator, and in most cases a value. This article lists every operator, what it matches, and which field types offer it.

The operator list is filtered by the selected field’s data type, and the field also sets which operator is preselected. An operator absent from the list is not available for that field rather than hidden by permission.

Every example below uses placeholder values. Substitute the field and value names from your own tenant.

Operators

Each row pairs an operator with an example condition and a document that satisfies it. In the product, the operator list is filtered by the selected field’s data type.

Table 1. Every operator, with an example

Contains is case-insensitive. A condition looking for freight matches Freight and FREIGHT. This widens matching deliberately, so a Contains condition on a short string can match more documents than intended. CR also matches the word CREDIT.

Operators by field type

Each field type offers a fixed set of operators and preselects one of them.

Table 2. Operators offered, by field type

Amount and number fields share one set, so they are listed together. Boolean fields, such as Prepaid, take Yes or No as the value, chosen from a list.

Three rows in that table have consequences that matter.

Date fields offer two operators only. Equals, Not Equals, and the comparison operators are not available for dates. A date condition is always expressed as a range relative to another date field.

Amount and number fields include Is Blank and Exists, alongside the comparison operators. An amount condition can therefore test whether a figure is present at all, not only how large it is.

Value boxes on amount and number conditions accept numbers only. A formula can be entered only in the Calculate As action, not in a condition.

Vendor Name is not an ordinary dropdown. It offers Contains, which no other dropdown does, and it does not offer Equals or Not Equals. To match one specific supplier, use In with a single value rather than looking for Equals.

Figure 1. The operator list for an amount field.

Fields that look numeric but are not

Three fields carry numeric-sounding names and behave as text: PO Line Number, Contract Line Number, and Bot Confidence Level. They offer Contains and no comparison operators at all.

Bot Confidence Level is the one to watch. You cannot write a condition meaning “confidence above 80”. Greater Than is not offered for it. A rule that needs to act on confidence has to match an exact value or test whether the field is populated.

Date conditions

Is Within and Is Beyond both compare one date field against another, offset by a period. A condition needs three things: the field being tested, a reference date field, and the offset.

The offset is expressed in years, months, and days. Preset offsets of 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, and 1 year are available, along with a custom option for any other combination.

Table 3. Worked date conditions

Limits on the offset

Each part of the offset is capped, and the boxes accept two digits:

Each box carries the maximum as a hard limit, so an offset above it cannot be entered.

Dropdown fields

Dropdown fields hold values drawn from your connected system. Which ones exist depends on your ERP and your field configuration; Entity, Currency, Cost Center, and Spend Category are typical.

In accepts several values at once, so a single condition can cover a set of suppliers or cost centers without repeating the rule. One condition reading Cost Center In 1000, 1200, 1400 replaces three separate rules.

Vendor Name offers an All vendors (including future) option. Selecting it matches every supplier, including ones onboarded after the rule was written, so the rule does not need revisiting as suppliers are added. Use it deliberately, because it also picks up suppliers nobody has reviewed the rule against. Where a rule is genuinely supplier-specific, list the suppliers with In instead.

Header and line fields

The field picker groups fields under headings. Header Fields and Line Fields hold the extracted invoice fields; a third heading, Document, sits at the end of the list. The distinction matters because the same field name can exist at both levels, and a rule that tests the header value of a field is not testing the line values of the same name.

Which fields sit at which level is set by your ERP and field configuration, so read the headings rather than assuming a field is where you expect it.

Figure 2. The field picker, grouped into Header Fields and Line Fields.

A condition on a line-level field also carries a scope, offering Any Line or All Lines, with Any Line preselected. Every line-level field the picker offers behaves this way:

Table 4. Line condition scope, on a three-line invoice

On a document with no lines, neither scope has a line to match.

Because Any Line is the default, a condition left untouched is the looser of the two. Where a rule should only fire when an entire document qualifies, All Lines has to be chosen deliberately.

The Document group

Below Header Fields and Line Fields, the picker carries a third heading, Document. It holds attributes of the document itself rather than values extracted from it.

The group holds an entry labeled Vendor. It matches a document by how the supplier that sent it is configured, so one rule can cover every vendor set up the same way without naming them individually. It takes the In operator only, and its values are chosen from check boxes:

Both values can be selected at once, in which case the condition matches either group.

How conditions combine

Conditions combine with AND only. Every condition in the IF clause has to be true for the THEN actions to run. OR is not available, and conditions cannot be nested.

A two-condition IF clause reads as one statement:

Vendor Name In Northwind Supplies AND Entity Equals US Operations

That fires only for invoices from that supplier and that entity. To act on either of two situations, build two rules, or fold both cases into one rule using ELSE.

Keyword extraction

Keyword extraction is available under Early Access. Your Auditoria contact can tell you whether it is switched on for your organization.

Keyword extraction matches text in the document body rather than in an extracted field, so a rule can act on something printed on the invoice that is not captured as a field of its own.

To build a keyword condition:

1. In Select field, select Document.
2. Select the Contains operator. It is the only operator this field offers.
3. Enter the keyword or phrase to match.

The value uses a key and value syntax, which holds several matching criteria in one condition:

key: value1,value2 | key2: value3

Keys are separated by a vertical bar; the values for one key are separated by commas. A worked value:

costcenter: 1000,1200 | project: APAC-ROLLOUT

That single condition matches a document whose body mentions cost center 1000 or 1200, and the project reference APAC-ROLLOUT.

Results

You can choose the operator a field type actually offers, and predict what a condition matches and what it does not, including date fields, dropdowns, and header against line scope.

Related information

• For the IF-THEN-ELSE model these conditions sit inside, see What Are Business Rules?.
• To build a condition, see Create and Manage Business Rules.
• For what happens when the conditions are met, see Business Rule Actions.
• For the checks that reject a condition, see Business Rule Validation and Field Warnings.