Automatic Task Distribution Overview

Written by Uday Kumar Updated

Who this is for. SuperAdmins, and anyone who works the queue. Applies to. AP Helpdesk. Access. Creating policies, rules and teams requires the TEAM_MANAGEMENT permission. See the Roles and Access Reference.

What task distribution is

Task distribution gives every AP Helpdesk task an owner the moment the agent raises it from a vendor email. Instead of one person watching a shared queue and handing work out, each task reaches the right person on its own.

You control who gets what through a distribution policy. A policy is an ordered list of rules. One rule might send anything from a given domain to one person. Another might send vendors whose name starts A to M to the north-east team.

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

Why use it

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

  • Gives each task 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, so you can see who got what and when.

Where one person handles every task, the assignee is always the same. Rules apply where the queue is shared, or where work is split by vendor, entity or region.

Where to find it

Two places matter.

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 Distribution. Where the agent also runs AP Invoices the entry reads Automatic Task and Document Distribution.

Create the teams that rules assign work to

Administration, then Team Management.

Roles involved

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

Table 2. Roles this section refers to

Role

What it does with task distribution

SuperAdmin

Creates and edits policies, rules and teams. Assigns or reassigns any task to any eligible user.

ProcureToPay Manager

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

ProcureToPay Agent

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

All three can receive tasks. Only a user whose role covers AP Helpdesk can be assigned one. Eligibility is checked at the moment of assignment. That applies to a rule naming a person and to team rotation alike. For what happens when someone stops being eligible, see Working with Assigned Documents.

The parts of a policy

Table 3. What each part is

Part

What it is

Distribution policy

The container for your rules. One policy for each SmartFlow, and one SmartFlow 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

One question drives almost every difference in these articles. Does the agent run AP Helpdesk on its own, or alongside AP Invoices? Read this once and the rest of the section follows.

Table 4. The two setups

What the agent runs

What the policy looks like

What the policy list shows

AP Helpdesk on its own

One list of rules and no tabs. Every rule routes tasks, so there is no rule type to choose when you add one.

Policy Rules as a plain count, and no Distributed Documents column.

AP Helpdesk with AP Invoices

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 coloured badges side by side, one for each kind, and a Distributed Documents column.

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

Availability

Task distribution runs whenever the agent runs AP Helpdesk. There is no separate switch for it, unlike document distribution.

Turning AP Helpdesk off on an agent archives its task 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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