Document Distribution Overview

Written by Uday Kumar Updated

Who this is for. Anyone setting up or working with document distribution. Access. Creating policies, rules and teams requires the TEAM_MANAGEMENT permission and the feature enabled for the tenant. See the Roles and Access Reference.

Start here if you have not used document distribution before. This article says what it does, when it is worth setting up, and where each part lives.

What document distribution is

Document distribution gives every incoming invoice an owner at the moment it is created. Instead of one person watching a shared mailbox and handing work out, each invoice reaches the right queue on its own, and whoever is responsible sees it in the Assignee column.

You control who gets what through a distribution policy: an ordered list of rules such as invoices from anyone at a given domain go to one person or vendors whose name starts A to M go to the north-east team.

The first rule whose conditions all match decides the owner. Where no rule matches, the invoice is created without an assignee.

Why use it

Document distribution is for a queue that more than one person works. It does three things.

  • Gives each invoice an owner without anyone sorting the queue by hand.

  • Spreads work across a team in turn, rather than onto whoever looks first.

  • Records every assignment in Document History, so you can see who got what and when.

Where one person handles every invoice, the assignee is always the same and the rules add nothing. The work of writing rules pays off once the queue is shared, or once you need invoices split by vendor, entity or region.

Where to find it

Table 1. Where each part is set up

What you want to do

Where it is

Create policies and the rules inside them

Administration in the left navigation rail, then Automatic Task and Document Distribution.

Create the teams that rules assign work to

Administration, then Team Management. This is available whatever the agent runs.

Turn document distribution on for an agent

SmartFlow Skills Management, then the skill's Settings tab.

See who owns a document, or hand it to someone else

The Assignee column on the AP Invoices lists, and the Assignee field on the document itself.

Both Administration entries are for SuperAdmins. What the menu is called depends on the agent, which is covered in Turn On Document Distribution.

Roles involved

Three roles appear throughout this section. A role can be granted to the user directly or inherited from their team, and an inherited role is shown in the Team Roles column of User Management.

Table 2. Roles this section refers to

Role

What it does with document distribution

SuperAdmin

Creates and edits policies, rules and teams. Assigns or reassigns any document to any eligible user, or sets it back to [None].

ProcureToPay Manager

Assigns or reassigns any document to any eligible user, or sets it back to [None]. Cannot create policies or teams.

ProcureToPay Agent

Picks up an unassigned document and puts it back down. Cannot hand it to someone else.

All three can receive documents. Only a user whose role makes them eligible for AP Invoices can be assigned one, and eligibility is checked at the moment of assignment, for a rule that names a person and for team rotation alike. For what happens when someone stops being eligible, see Working with Assigned Documents.

Availability

Document distribution is turned on for each agent rather than for the tenant, so one agent can use it while another does not. For the setting and what each choice does, see Turn On Document Distribution.

It works with Workday, Oracle NetSuite, Coupa, Sage Intacct, the Universal Connector and Composite SOR sources.

Turning a product off on an agent archives that product’s rules rather than deleting them. They stop running while the product is off and come back when it is turned on again, so you do not have to rebuild them.

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