Who this is for. Everyone. See the Roles and Access.
You work alongside Agent Co-workers you did not configure. This article explains what they are doing, so their output makes sense, particularly the cases where the agent appears to have done nothing.
What each function does
Anything that reaches you is work an Agent Co-worker could not finish within its limits. For what each function handles and what it produces, see What AP Helpdesk Does.
What they cannot do
An agent works within an autonomy level someone else set, and within what the integration user is permitted to do in the connected system. Neither is visible from the queue, so some tasks appear as though the agent declined to act.
When a task arrives that you expected the agent to handle, the useful question is which limit stopped it. There are four.
Table 1. Why a task reached you
Limit |
What it looks like |
Who can change it |
|---|---|---|
Autonomy level |
The agent prepared everything and stopped short of sending or writing to the system of record. |
Super Admin, in the Agent Co-worker configuration |
Sender type |
No reply drafted at all, for a sender you recognize. |
Super Admin, via Contact Management |
Missing data |
A lookup returned nothing, so it could not complete the answer. |
Super Admin, via the connection |
Integration permissions |
Everything looks right but nothing posted. |
Super Admin |
Open the reasoning on the task before escalating. It usually names the limit directly, which tells you whether the answer sits with your manager or with a Super Admin.
Why the split matters when something goes wrong
Each agent owns a different kind of work, so the first question on any report is which one was responsible. Mail that was never answered is an AP Helpdesk question. A document that never posted is an AP Invoices question. They fail for different reasons and are fixed in different places, and the queue does not distinguish them for you.
A quiet queue has two possible causes: the agents cleared the work, or nothing reached them. The two look identical from the queue alone, so check what arrived alongside what was done with it.
Where an agent could act and did not, the autonomy level, a processing rule, or a sender classification decided it. Where an agent could not act at all, the cause is upstream: a connection, a mailbox, or a record that never synced.