Who this is for. Whoever sets AP Helpdesk up, which is a Super Admin.
The Settings step decides what the instance is for and how far the agent goes on its own. It is the longest step in the wizard, and the one that shapes day-to-day behaviour most.
Turn on a function
Under Configuration, select at least one of Turn on AP Helpdesk and Turn on AP Invoices. Continue stays disabled until one is selected.
Selecting Turn on AP Helpdesk reveals the settings below, and adds the Intents & Outcomes and AI Agent Replies steps to the wizard.
Enroll new vendors automatically
Auto-Enroll New Vendor Records enrolls vendor records for agent email processing as they arrive from a sync of the system of record. Leave it off to decide enrollment yourself, vendor by vendor.
Enrollment is what decides whether the agent answers a vendor’s mail at all, so this setting governs how quickly new vendors come into scope. See Vendors.
Vendor categories
The agent can reply differently by vendor category. Select the categories that should get their own wording, and each one gains a tab in AI Agent Replies.
Standard Vendor is always selected and cannot be cleared. It is the fallback for every vendor not covered by another category. The remaining categories come from your own vendor data, so the list differs between tenants.
Internal contacts
List the employees who write to the mailbox, so their mail is classified as internal rather than external. Enter an address and press Enter, Tab, or comma to add it.
Getting this list right matters more than it looks. An employee who is not listed is classified by domain instead, and may be treated as a cohort sender or an unknown one.
Collaborative mode
Collaborative Mode puts a person between the agent and the vendor: the agent’s outcomes and replies are reviewed, edited, and approved before they go out. It is selected by default on a new instance.
Turning it off does not change what the agent detects. It changes whether a reply waits for someone. Two things follow from it that are easy to miss: the review queue in Ready for Review in Collaborative Mode only fills when it is on, and the task-related dashboard panels only appear when it is on.
Collaborative mode carries its own settings.
Table 1. Collaborative mode settings.
Setting |
What it does |
|---|---|
Relaxed Pre-Check |
Processes mail where the mailbox address is not in the To field as though it were, which covers Cc, Bcc, alias, and redirected mail. Without it, that mail is left alone. |
Internal Contact Relaxed Matching |
Checks the sender domain against your allow-listed relaxed matching domains to decide whether it qualifies as an internal sender. A domain match is treated as though every sender on that domain were listed individually as an internal contact. Public domains cannot be added. |
Tasks for Internal Cohort Senders |
Raises a task when mail arrives from an internal cohort sender, meaning a domain matching your configured internal contacts. |
Tasks for External Cohort Senders |
Raises a task when mail arrives from an external cohort sender, meaning a domain matching a contact on a record. |
Tasks for System Senders |
Raises a task when mail arrives from a configured system sender. Off by default, because system mail is not meant to reach the queue. |
Autonomous Invoice Submission File Transfer |
Transfers invoice attachments that are classified as invoices and not flagged as duplicates before, and without waiting for, review of the task raised alongside them. The task can still be edited and reprocessed separately. |
Autonomous Credit Memo Submission File Transfer |
The same for credit memo attachments. |
Suppress adding labels to Connected Mailbox |
Stops the agent writing its labels back into the connected mailbox. Labels still appear in the Helpdesk mailbox. |
Support for sender type [SYSTEM] |
Enables System as a sender type, so automated sources are classified rather than treated as vendor mail. |
Assignee Hold for Threaded Message Tasks |
Keeps later messages in a thread with the person already handling it, rather than routing them independently. |
Conditional Task Dismissal |
Dismisses tasks automatically where the conditions for doing so are met. |
Task Suppression for Threaded Messages |
Conditionally skips creating a task for a new message on a thread that already has an outstanding task, so one conversation does not generate a queue of its own. |
Email archiving
Email Archiving lets messages and threads be hidden from the Helpdesk mailbox Inbox view and read from the Archive view instead. The behaviour is worth stating precisely, because two parts of it surprise people:
An archived thread comes back to the Inbox on its own when a reply arrives.
Archived mail is excluded from Inbox filters and Inbox search, but can be filtered and searched in the Archive view.
Archiving here does not archive anything in the connected mailbox. The two are separate.
A message or thread with a New or Open task cannot be archived.
Auto-Archive After Days (on Task DONE or Email READ) sets how long to wait before archiving automatically. Archive support for UNREAD Emails extends archiving to mail whose ad hoc review status is still Unread.
Date format
Date Format sets how dates are written in the SmartVendor console, in the agent’s replies, and in the attachments those replies carry. Choose the convention your vendors read, not the one your team prefers, since the setting reaches outgoing mail.
Figure 1. Turning on AP Helpdesk.
Figure 2. Vendor categories. Standard Vendor is always selected.
Figure 3. The Internal Contacts field.
Figure 4. Collaborative mode and its settings.
Figure 5. Email archiving.
Figure 6. Date format.