How Document Distribution Works

Written by Uday Kumar Updated September 21, 2026 11:14

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.

This article is the reference for how a policy is built and how the two setups differ. For what document distribution does and where it lives, see Document Distribution Overview.

The parts of a policy

Table 1. What each part is

Part	What it is
Distribution policy	The container for your rules. One policy for each AI Agent, and one AI Agent for each policy.
Rule	A single statement of when this, then assign to that. It has a position in the order, one or more conditions, and one or more actions.
Condition	One test, made of an input attribute, an operator and a value.
Action	What happens on a match. Assign to a user or to a team, and on a task rule, set a priority.
Team	A named group of people. A rule that assigns to a team gives its members work in turn.
Rule type	Whether a rule routes documents or AP Helpdesk tasks. It matters only where the agent runs both.

What your agent runs changes what you see

Almost every difference in these articles comes back to one question: does the agent run AP Invoices on its own, or alongside AP Helpdesk. Read this once and the rest of the section follows.

Table 2. The two setups

What the agent runs	What the policy looks like	What the policy list shows
AP Invoices on its own	One list of rules and no tabs. Every rule routes documents, so there is no rule type to choose when you add one.	A single document rules badge.
AP Invoices with AP Helpdesk	Two tabs, Document Rules and Task Rules. Each keeps its own order and its own rule numbering, and a rule belongs to one tab.	Two badges side by side, one for each kind.

Document rules and task rules never compete. When a document is created only document rules are considered, and when a task is created only task rules are. One email that raises both produces two assignments, decided separately, so a document and a task from the same email can have different owners.

Related information

For what document distribution does and where it lives, see Document Distribution Overview.
To switch it on for an agent, see Turn On Document Distribution.
To create the policy, see Create a Distribution Policy.
To write the rules, see Build Assignment Rules.
To work an assigned document, see Working with Assigned Documents.