Who this is for. AP Helpdesk Analysts, Specialists and Managers, and ProcureToPay Managers and Agents. The Mailbox opens for every AP role, on an agent running either function. See the Roles and Access.
The Mailbox is the AP agent’s inbox. Every message the agent receives arrives here, together with what the agent made of it: how it classified the message, which vendor and which records it matched, and whether it answered on its own or stopped and raised a review task.
This article covers the screen itself, so that the rest of the section can assume you know where things are. It explains how to open the Mailbox, what each pane is for, the difference between the two views, and how to read a row without opening it.
Open the mailbox
Open SmartVendor.
Select the mail icon at the right-hand end of the tab bar, on the same row as Dashboard and Bills.
The Mailbox opens on the Inbox folder in the By Threads view.
Figure 1. The Mailbox, By Threads view.
What is on screen
The Mailbox is four panes, from left to right.
Table 1. The four panes.
Pane |
What it holds |
|---|---|
Folder panel |
Compose, the four folders, and the label list. Hidden by default. Select the panel icon to the left of Inbox to show it. |
Toolbar |
The view switch, the search box, the filters, and refresh. |
List |
One row per thread or per message, depending on the view. |
Reading pane |
The message you selected. In the By Incoming Messages view a fourth pane, Email Thread, sits to its right and shows the rest of the conversation. |
The folder panel
The folder panel is collapsed when you arrive. The icon immediately to the left of the word Inbox opens and closes it, and its tooltip tells you which it will do: Show mailbox folders when it is closed, Hide mailbox folders when it is open.
Figure 2. The folder panel, with the four folders and the start of the label list.
Table 2. Folders.
Folder |
What it holds |
|---|---|
Inbox |
Everything the agent has received and not archived. This is where you start. |
Sent |
Messages the agent sent, whether it sent them on its own or you released them. |
Drafts |
Replies the agent has written but not sent. The count beside the name is the number waiting. |
Archived |
Messages that have been taken out of the Inbox. Archiving does not delete anything and the message stays searchable. |
Compose sits above the folder list. See Compose and Send a Message.
Labels
Below the folders is a LABELS list. Labels are applied by the agent, not by you, and they record what it concluded about a message. Selecting one filters the list to the messages carrying it, and None selects the messages that carry no label at all.
Labels fall into three broad families, and reading which family a label belongs to is usually enough to tell you why a message is where it is.
Table 3. Label families.
Family |
Examples |
What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
What the sender asked for |
|
The intent the agent read from the message. |
What the agent did |
|
The outcome. These are the messages that closed themselves. |
Why it stopped |
|
The reason the agent could not finish. These are the labels worth filtering on when you are clearing a backlog. |
The exact set of labels depends on how your agent is configured, so your list may be shorter or longer than the one shown here.
Two views, two totals
The two views need the AP Helpdesk function. On an agent that runs AP Invoices only, the Mailbox opens and works, but without the view switch: the inbox is a single flat list, and the sorting control and the per-message task and priority information described below are not present. Everything else in this article applies to both functions.
The two buttons at the left of the toolbar switch the view, and each carries its own total. The totals differ because they count different things.
Table 4. The two views.
View |
One row is |
Use it when |
|---|---|---|
By Threads |
A conversation. A thread with four replies is one row, and the row carries a N message chip. |
You are answering a vendor and need the whole exchange in front of you. |
By Incoming Messages |
A single inbound message. That same four-reply thread contributes several rows. |
You are working a queue and need to see the AI status and priority of each message on its own. |
The two views do not share a toolbar. The filters differ, and only By Incoming Messages offers saved filters. See Search and Filter the Mailbox.
What a thread row shows
In the By Threads view, a row carries the sender, how long ago the last message arrived, a paperclip if anything is attached, the subject or (no subject), and the first line of the message itself.
Below that sit the chips: a N message count, the sender type, and any labels the agent applied. A filled blue dot at the left of the row marks a thread nobody has read yet.
What a message row shows
The By Incoming Messages view changes both the text and the chips. The line under the subject is not the message body, it is the agent’s one-sentence summary of what the sender wanted. The chips become priority, sender type and AI status.
Figure 3. The By Incoming Messages view, with priority, sender type and status on every row.
This is the practical difference between the views. By Threads shows you what the vendor wrote. By Incoming Messages shows you what the agent made of it, with its priority, sender type and AI status.
Sender type
A strip above the list acts as a legend: External, Internal, System and Unknown, each with its own icon and color. Every row carries one of the four.
Table 5. Sender types.
Chip |
The sender is |
|---|---|
External |
Outside your organization. In practice this is vendor mail. |
Internal |
Inside your organization, usually a colleague forwarding something to AP. |
System |
A machine rather than a person, such as a bounce notice or an automatic out-of-office reply. |
Unknown |
A sender the agent could not place in any of the above. |
The chip is a summary. The agent records a finer value underneath it, distinguishing an Enrolled sender it has matched to a vendor record from an Unenrolled one it has not, and that value is shown in the Message Metadata dialog rather than on the row. See Read a Message.
Sender type is the first thing worth reading, because it tells you whether a message is even yours to answer before you open it.
Refresh and page through the list
The Mailbox does not poll. The circular arrow at the right-hand end of the toolbar, Refresh inbox, pulls in anything that has arrived since the page loaded.
The list pages rather than scrolls forever. At the foot of the list, Rows per page sets the page size and the counter beside it reads 1-20 of 1469, so you can always see where you are in the total. The arrows step one page at a time.
Changing the page size or the page does not clear your search or your filters.
Where to go next
To narrow the list, see Search and Filter the Mailbox.
To open a message and read it, see Read a Message.
To see why the agent decided what it did, see Review the AI Decision.
To change that decision, see Override a Triage Decision.