Who this is for. AP Helpdesk Analysts, Specialists and Managers, and ProcureToPay Managers and Agents. Every AP role can open this screen; the behavior it describes needs the AP Helpdesk function on the agent. See the Roles and Access.
This article is the routine, not the reference. It puts the other Mailbox articles in the order you actually use them on a normal day, from opening the inbox to leaving it empty of anything that needed you.
If you have not used the Mailbox before, read Mailbox Overview first. This article assumes you know where things are.
Before you start
The agent has already worked overnight. Most of what is in the Inbox needs nothing from you, and the point of the routine below is to find the part that does without reading the rest.
Work in the By Incoming Messages view. It is the only view that shows the agent’s status and priority on the row, which is what you are sorting on.
Figure 1. The By Incoming Messages view, showing status and priority on every row.
Step 1: Take the drafts waiting on you
Filter Status to Draft Ready. Every message here has a reply written and is waiting for a person to release it.
Open the message and read the Intelligent Summary to see what the sender wanted.
Open AI Reasoning and Related Info and select Draft Response to read the reply.
Check any figure in the draft against the SOR stage, which is where those figures came from.
If it is right, select Approve & Send. If it is not, see Override a Triage Decision.
This is the highest-value pass of the day, because every draft you send is a vendor answered.
Step 2: Decide the messages the agent would not
Filter Action to Needs Review. These are messages the agent deliberately stopped on.
Take the task before you do anything else. The override controls stay locked while the task is unassigned, and claiming it also stops a colleague working the same message.
Then read the Triage stage. The reasoning names why it stopped, and that is usually enough to tell you whether the answer is a correction, a reply of your own, or nothing at all.
Step 3: Clear what broke
Two filters find work that failed rather than work that is waiting.
Status set to Failed finds messages whose processing ended in an error.
Processing State set to Stalled, in the By Threads view, finds messages that stopped part way and are not going to finish on their own.
For either, open the Processing Timeline and find the stage that did not complete. That stage is where processing stopped.
Step 4: Look at what the agent sent on its own
Filter Status to Auto-sent and read a few. Nothing here needs you, which is the point: this is the sample that tells you whether the agent is getting it right on the messages nobody checks.
Pay attention to the Confidence figure on the Triage stage. A message answered automatically on low confidence is the pattern worth catching early, before the same category of mail goes out wrong for a month.
What to check when something looks wrong
Work down this list. It is ordered so that the cheapest check comes first.
Table 1. Diagnosing a bad outcome.
Symptom |
Where to look |
|---|---|
The reply went to the wrong vendor |
Record Match in Message Metadata. A match on Domain rather than Contact is the usual cause. |
The reply was thinner than expected |
Extracted Values on the SOR stage. Where the agent found no identifiers in the message, it had nothing specific to answer about. |
The agent answered the wrong question |
EMAIL CATEGORY on the Intelligent Summary, then the Email Category Detection stage for the confidence and the explanation. |
An attachment was ignored |
The classification on the attachment. unsupported means nothing was read out of it. |
The message took far too long |
BOTTLENECK on the Processing Timeline. |
The agent behaved differently from usual |
Correction History on the Triage stage. Someone, or the agent itself, may have already changed the routing. |
Make it repeatable
The By Incoming Messages filters above are the same every day, so save them. The Stalled check runs in By Threads, which has no saved filters, so set that one each time. Set the filter, select Save filter, and reopen it from My filters the next morning. See Search and Filter the Mailbox.
Where a queue is shared, add Assigned To set to Me so that your saved filter shows your work rather than everyone’s.