Capture in action: Invoices that forward themselves to the right team

Capture is the invoice intake layer of Xelix. It reads every invoice in any layout, and pulls out the data your AP process runs on, with no templates to set up or maintain. Its agents take on the repetitive tasks your team shouldn’t have to keep doing manually.

In this series, we’re taking those tasks one at a time and showing how Capture handles each one by itself.

Last time, we looked at filling in the invoice fields your OCR leaves blank. Next up: getting every invoice to the right AP team, whichever mailbox it lands in.

Why invoices end up in the wrong mailbox

If your organisation runs more than one entity, you probably have more than one AP mailbox. A US team, a UK team, maybe a shared service centre covering several regions. Suppliers don't always keep up, their records point to an old contact, or they send everything to the first address they were given.

So an invoice billed to your UK entity lands in the US AP mailbox. Someone has to open it, notice the bill-to entity doesn't match, work out which team owns it and forward it on. Until they do, the invoice sits in a queue where nobody is going to process it, meanwhile its payment terms keep running.

It's a small task, but it happens every day, across every mailbox. And it delays every invoice it touches before anyone has even started processing it.

Tell Capture once where each invoice belongs

Capture fixes this with agents. Think of an agent as a digital assistant for your AP team. It takes a task someone would otherwise do by hand and carries it out on every invoice it applies to. You set agents up in natural language, the way you’d brief a new team member, and decide whether each one applies to all suppliers, one company code or a single supplier.

For mailbox rerouting, the instruction is one your team already follows: check who the invoice is billed to, and make sure it's in that entity's mailbox. For example, “If an invoice is billed to our UK entity, it belongs in the UK AP mailbox.”

Let’s say an invoice billed to your UK entity arrives in the US AP mailbox.

Here’s how Capture handles it:

1. Capture reads the invoice and extracts who it's billed to
2. The mailbox rerouting agent checks the bill-to entity against your routing instructions and identifies that it belongs to the UK team
3. The agent forwards the original email, invoice attached, to the UK AP mailbox
4. It adds a short note explaining that the invoice was rerouted and why
5. The reroute is logged on the invoice, so anyone can see where it arrived and where it went

That’s one misrouted invoice in the right place, without anyone forwarding it. The same works however your AP team is split, whether that's a mailbox per country, per division or per shared service centre.

Write the rule once and Capture applies it to every invoice that arrives.

See the agent in action

Watch an invoice billed to a UK entity arrive in the US mailbox, and see Capture send it straight to the right team.

Fix intake, and STP follows

Misrouted invoices aren't an edge case. Each one adds a manual step before processing has even started, and holds the invoice up for as long as it sits in the wrong queue. Each agent you set up fixes the process itself, not just one invoice, so every invoice that follows goes straight to the team that owns it.

Here's what that means for AP teams:

• Invoices in the right place from the start: each one reaches the team that owns it as soon as it arrives.
• Less inbox triage: your team stops checking bill-to entities and forwarding emails by hand.
• Fewer delays: no invoice waits in the wrong queue while its payment terms run down.
• You stay in control: you set the routing rules, then the agent acts. Every reroute is logged with a note explaining why, so you can trace it.
• Cleaner data downstream: Capture works ahead of the ERP you already run, so matching, approval and posting start from complete invoices.

The impact can show up quickly. One customer's touchless rate in Capture, the share of invoices that go through intake without anyone touching them, more than doubled in the first week after going live, from 30% to 69%. Fixing intake is what lays the foundation for higher STP rates.