This guide tells you everything about how your invoices reach Compleat safe and sound, with all of their important information accurately extracted and ready to be posted to your finance system.
We also provide a few useful pointers on how to make sure your invoices arrive quickly, and with accuracy.
How do invoices reach Compleat?
Invoices reach Compleat via your e-invoicing email address. When an invoice is sent to this email address, it goes through Compleat's Capture Portal, which extracts all of the data needed to process and approve the invoice.
Be mindful when inputting your e-invoice email address. Particularly when copying and pasting from somewhere eg. Outlook or an email application, as it may add special characters such as "<" and ">" to the address when you paste eg. <YourCompanyName@compleat-einvoicing.com>
The invoice will then arrive in your Compleat application where, if a PO number is extracted, it will be automatically matched to a purchase order. If the invoice doesn’t match a PO, then it's sent to the Unprocessed tray for manual processing.
Receiving invoices from suppliers
Over 95% of our customers' invoices are sent directly to Compleat from their suppliers. To have your suppliers send invoices directly to Compleat, all you need is to share your e-invoicing email address with them.
YourCompanyName@compleat-einvoicing.com
If a supplier ever sends an invoice to your own email address, we recommend that you ask them to resend the invoice to your e-invoicing email address. This allows our Capture Portal to learn who your suppliers are, and how their invoices present data. This ultimately means your invoices will arrive in Compleat more quickly.
The benefit of suppliers sending invoices to us directly
Before an invoice can be processed, Compleat needs to know who the supplier is to apply the correct ruleset. Suppliers are determined by the email address used to send the invoice in. Emails are “mapped” to the supplier at the first time of sending and saved so when the second invoice arrives, our system recognises the email, and automatically assigns the correct supplier.
Recommended invoice format
Our Capture Portal can extract data from a variety of file formats, but .pdf is by far the most effective. These are often exported from a finance system, or from Word or Excel documents. These files retain their digital information when converted into .pdf, which our Capture Portal can extract with 100% accuracy.
A well formatted invoice is all we need
The ideal invoice for us would be a clearly laid out document with obvious labeling of information such as Invoice, Date, Invoice Number, Purchase Order Number, Gross, Net and VAT values. This rule can apply to a recommended PDF format, or a scanned invoice where we can clearly identify the
aforementioned values.
As a last resort, you can send .xls, .doc, .html, and .txt files to Compleat, and our Capture Portal will convert them into PDF.
Not recommended formats
We recommend that you avoid sending scanned images or photographs such as .jpg, .png or .tif files to Compleat. Even images that have been exported into .pdf format are still best to be avoided.
Although the invoice data will be extracted, our Capture Portal may struggle to collect it accurately, which means it could take longer to process.
