What AP Helpdesk Does

Who this is for. Everyone.

The vendor mailbox problem, what the agent takes off the desk, and what stays with a person.

AP Helpdesk is the part of Auditoria that works your accounts payable mailbox. It reads every message that arrives in that mailbox, works out who sent it and what they want, looks the answer up in your system of record, and either answers the vendor or raises a task for a person.

It is not a chatbot you ask for things, and it is not a batch job that runs overnight. It runs continuously against one mailbox and one system of record, and the only work that reaches you is what it could not finish within the limits it was given.

The problem it is built for

An AP mailbox is a queue of interruptions. Most of what arrives is a small number of questions asked over and over, and almost all of them are answerable from data your ERP already holds:

• Has invoice 4471 been paid yet?

• Can you send the remittance for the payment received on the 3rd?

• Attached is our invoice for March.

• Why was this payment $240 short?

• What is the status of PO 88213?

Each one is quick. There are just a lot of them, they arrive all day, and answering one means leaving whatever else you were doing, finding the vendor, finding the invoice, and typing a reply. That is the cost AP Helpdesk is aimed at: not the hard cases, the volume of easy ones.

Where to start. Read Key Concepts before anything that uses its terms. The articles up to Your Role and Access are for everyone, including analysts who only work the exception queue; SmartVendor Console and Set Up Your AP Workcenter are for whoever configures and administers it. Signing in is covered in the Administration and Platform Guide.

What the agent actually does

The agent reads each message, classifies the sender, works out what the message is about, looks the answer up in your system of record, and either answers the vendor or raises a task. For the stages this runs through, what each one produces, and how to read the stage a message stopped at, see How an AP Helpdesk Agent Processes Email.

What changes for the accounts payable department

Table 1. Before and after

Every decision the agent makes is on screen and auditable, so a disputed reply can be traced back to the records it was written from.

What stays with a person

The agent works inside the limits you configure. Four things stay with a person:

• Judgment calls. Anything the records cannot settle: a disputed deduction, a vendor asking for an exception.

• What the agent may write back to your system of record. Where a write must not happen without a person, write the rule so that it prepares the write rather than performs it.

• Unrecognized senders. A message the agent cannot tie to a vendor gets a deliberately thin reply with no supplier detail, and a task where your sender-type settings raise one.

• The rules themselves. The agent follows the categories, guidance and rules your desk configures. It does not invent policy, and it does not learn your preferences implicitly; behavior changes when someone changes a setting.

AP Helpdesk both reads and writes your system of record. It reads vendor, invoice, payment and purchase order records to answer mail. A processing rule can also direct it to transfer an invoice or credit memo attachment, to prepare a write to the system of record for review, or to write back without review. Which of those happens is set rule by rule, in Processing Rules.

Where AP Helpdesk sits

There is no agent called "AP Helpdesk". AP Helpdesk is a function you select on an Agent Co-worker, a configured instance bound to one system of record and one mailbox. The same instance can also carry AP Invoices, which handles documents rather than mail; the two are configured independently.

Table 2. The two functions

This guide covers AP Helpdesk only.

Related information

• Key Concepts

• AP Workcenter Overview