Who this is for. Everyone, and the place to start if the AP Workcenter is new to you.
Access. No permission required to read this article; what you can see in the product depends on your role. See the Roles and Access.
The AP Workcenter is where accounts payable work happens. Agent Co-workers are configured in it. They read the mail and documents arriving from vendors, act on what they can, and raise the rest as tasks for a person.
The distinction that matters most on your first day: the agent is not a chatbot you ask for things, and it is not a batch job that runs overnight. It works continuously against a mailbox and a system of record, and the only work that reaches you is what it could not finish within the limits it was given.
What it handles
An agent can carry one function or several.
Table 1. The two functions
Function |
Works on |
Typical output |
|---|---|---|
AP Helpdesk |
Mail arriving in a connected mailbox. |
A reply sent, a label or note added, or a task raised. |
AP Invoices |
Documents: invoices and credit memos. |
A document posted to the system of record, or routed for review. |
How the pieces fit
A connection brings data in: a system of record for vendors, bills, purchase orders and payments, and a mailbox for inbound mail. An Agent Co-worker is configured against that connection and given an autonomy level, which sets how far it may act without a person. What it cannot finish becomes a task in the AP Workcenter.
Each layer constrains the one below it. An agent cannot act on data its connection does not carry, and it cannot exceed the autonomy level it was given no matter how confident it is. Almost every “why did it not do that?” question resolves to one of those two limits.
How a vendor email is handled
Table 2. What happens to one vendor email
Stage |
What the agent does |
What you see |
|---|---|---|
Arrival |
Reads the message and classifies the sender as External, Internal, System or Unknown. |
The message in the Mailbox, with the sender type on the row. |
Classification |
Determines the email category: what the message is about. |
The email category on the message, shown as a label. |
Rules |
Applies the processing rules that match that sender type and category. |
A rules applied row on the task, listing the rules that fired. |
Action |
Sends a reply, applies a label, adds a note, or stops. |
A sent reply in the mailbox, if it was allowed to send. |
Escalation |
Where it may not act, or cannot resolve the request, raises a task. |
A task in the AP Workcenter, with the reasoning behind it. |
How many stop at the escalation row depends on the autonomy the agent is configured with. The work itself does not change, only how much of it reaches a person.
What it does not do
It does not replace your system of record. Everything it writes lands in your ERP, and your ERP remains the book of record.
It does not act outside its work scope. The system of record chosen when the agent was created is fixed.
It does not exceed the integration user’s permissions. A read-only integration user means nothing posts, whatever the configuration says.
It does not learn your preferences implicitly. Behavior changes when someone changes a setting or a rule.
Who does what
Three roles split the work in the accounts payable department, and what each typically does not touch is as telling as what it owns.
Table 3. Responsibilities by role
Role |
Owns |
Typically does not |
|---|---|---|
Super Admin |
Connections, users, roles, tenants, audit logs. |
Day-to-day capability configuration, though they can. |
AP Helpdesk Manager |
The rules the agent works by: categories, senders and processing rules. Owns what they say; a Super Admin makes the change. |
Connection-level work. |
AP Helpdesk Analyst |
The exceptions: working the task queue and the mailbox. |
Agent configuration. |
The screens each of them sees differ, because the navigation rail is filtered by role. Where a page is unavailable to a colleague, the cause is usually their permissions rather than the page.