Who this is for. Everyone.
AP Helpdesk works your accounts payable mailbox. It reads every message that arrives, decides who sent it and what they are asking for, looks the answer up in your system of record, and either replies to the vendor or raises a task for a person.
It runs continuously against one mailbox and one system of record. It is not a chatbot you ask for things, and it is not an overnight batch job. The only work that reaches your queue is what it could not finish on its own.
Where to start. Read Key Concepts before any article that uses its terms. The rest of this section is for everyone, including analysts who only work the queue. Configuring AP Helpdesk is for whoever sets it up.
The problem it is built for
An AP mailbox is a queue of interruptions. Most of what arrives is a small set of questions asked over and over, and nearly all of them are answerable from data your ERP already holds:
Has invoice 4471 been paid yet?
Can you send the remittance for the payment received on the 3rd?
Attached is our invoice for March.
Why was this payment 240 dollars short?
What is the status of PO 88213?
Each one is quick. There are simply a lot of them, they arrive all day, and answering one means leaving other work to find the vendor, find the invoice, and type a reply. That volume of easy questions is what AP Helpdesk is aimed at, not the hard cases.
What the AI Agent handles
The AI Agent detects the business intent of each message and acts on it. Which action follows an intent is configured for your tenant, in Intents and Outcomes, so the table below describes the usual outcome rather than a fixed one.
Table 1. Supported business intents.
Business intent |
What the sender wants |
Usual outcome |
|---|---|---|
Request for Payment Status |
Whether an invoice has been paid, and when. |
The agent queries the system of record and replies with the status. It can attach remittance advice as CSV or PDF. |
Request for PO Status |
The state of a purchase order. |
The agent replies with the purchase order status, or records that no matching purchase order was found. |
Request for Remittance Advice |
Confirmation of what a payment covered. |
The agent sends the remittance advice, or records that no payment information was available. |
Invoice Submission |
To submit an invoice for processing. |
The agent validates the attachment, checks for duplicates, and transfers it to the system of record or forwards it to your intake mailbox. |
Credit Memo Submission |
To submit a credit memo. |
The same path as an invoice submission, including the duplicate check. |
Request for Record Update |
A change to vendor details such as an address or bank record. |
The agent raises a task. Changes to vendor master data stay with a person. |
Short Pay Inquiry |
Why a payment was less than the invoiced amount. |
The agent raises a task with the payment and invoice records attached. |
A message the agent cannot place against any of these is recorded without a detected intent and raised for review.
What the AI Agent does with a message
Every message runs through the same sequence: the agent ingests it, classifies the sender, detects the intent, acts on it where it is permitted to, and raises a task for anything left over. For the full sequence, what each step produces, and how to read the step a message stopped at, see How AP Helpdesk Processes Email.
What stays with a person
The agent works inside the limits you configure. Four things stay with a person:
Judgment calls. Anything the records cannot settle, such as a disputed deduction or a vendor asking for an exception.
Unrecognized senders. A message the agent cannot tie to a vendor record gets a deliberately thin reply that carries no supplier detail, and a task where your sender settings raise one.
Review before sending, in collaborative mode. Where collaborative mode is on, a reply waits for a person to read, edit, and approve it. See Ready for Review in Collaborative Mode.
The configuration itself. The agent follows the intents, outcomes, and templates your desk configures. It does not set policy, and it does not learn preferences on its own. Behavior changes when someone changes a setting.
When AP Helpdesk fits
AP Helpdesk is built for teams that take supplier correspondence through a shared mailbox and answer the same questions repeatedly. It fits where:
The mailbox carries enough volume that triage takes real time each day.
The answers already exist in an ERP the platform can connect to.
Invoices and credit memos arrive as email attachments and are re-keyed or forwarded by hand.
The same invoice reaching the ERP twice is a problem worth preventing.
You need a record of why a supplier was told what they were told.
It fits less well where correspondence arrives through a portal rather than email, or where nearly every message needs a judgment call rather than a lookup. In those cases the agent still classifies and files the mail, but most of it becomes a task rather than a reply.