Email collection
for invoices and documents

The most common way invoices arrive at a small company is still email. The supplier sends a PDF as an attachment, the owner opens it, downloads it, saves it somewhere, and at month-end forwards a batch of attachments to their accountant. Or doesn’t, and the accountant has to chase.

Every step of that chain is a place where invoices get lost, duplicated, or forgotten.

Verifical replaces the chain with a single email address. The address belongs to the business, not to the accountant. Anything sent to it is read by Verifical, extracted automatically, and held for the owner’s review before it goes to the accountant for processing.

What’s wrong with the email-attachment chain

Email works fine for sending an occasional document. It’s a poor system for receiving fifty invoices a month.

Things get lost. A PDF attachment in an email thread is invisible to anyone who isn’t on the thread. The accountant doesn’t know it exists until someone forwards it. The owner forgets to forward it. The invoice doesn’t make it into the books that month.

Things get duplicated. A supplier sends the same invoice to the client and CCs the accountant. Both download it. Both ask “did you process this?” One ends up entered into the accounting software twice. Catching the duplicate takes longer than entering it correctly the first time.

Attachments are extra work. Every invoice received as a PDF attachment is a manual step: open email, download attachment, save to the right place, rename, then process. Across fifty invoices a month, that adds up.

Forwarding rules break. Some accountants set up email forwarding rules in their clients’ inboxes — anything matching invoice@* gets auto-forwarded somewhere. This works until the client changes email provider, the rules get cleared in a security audit, or a supplier sends from an unexpected address.

A unique Verifical address solves all four. It’s the destination, not a hop along the way.

How email collection works in Verifical

Setting up email collection takes a couple of minutes. Using it requires nothing.

1. Create the address in settings

In your Verifical workspace settings, you generate a unique inbound address. Each address has a label (e.g. “Received invoices”) and Verifical automatically generates a unique part — the result looks something like acme-received-invoices-g4bhq@in.verifical.com. You can add an optional custom suffix if you want a more memorable variant. The address is permanent, belongs to the company (not to a user), and survives any change in accountant or staff.

You can have one address or several, depending on your plan. A typical setup is one general address plus a few specialised ones — one for invoices, another for receipts, another for contracts. More on that in the next section.

2. Set the rules for each address

Each address can be configured to pre-assign two things to every document that arrives at it:

• Document type. Pick a default — invoice (received), receipt, contract, or any other type Verifical supports — and Verifical tags every document arriving at that address accordingly. So invoices@… lands invoices in the right queue, receipts@… lands receipts, and so on.
• Tags. Pick one or more tags from your company’s tag list. Every document arriving at that address gets those tags automatically.

The rules turn the most repetitive part of bookkeeping — categorising every invoice the same way every month — into something that just happens. A dedicated acme-received-invoices-g4bhq@in.verifical.com address with document type “Invoice received” and the right tags means every invoice from that supplier (or that channel) lands pre-categorised, ready for review.

3. The email arrives and is processed

When an email arrives at a Verifical address, Verifical reads it and extracts the contents. No matter if comes from the owner, an employee, a supplier, or any auto-forwarding rule.

• Attachments are detected by format. PDFs, scans, photos, and structured e-invoices (Peppol/UBL XML, ZUGFeRD/Factur-X, XRechnung, ISDOC, and ISDOCX) are each routed through the right pipeline. When an email arrives carrying both a PDF and a structured XML attachment for the same invoice, Verifical keeps the PDF as the document the user sees and reads the data from the XML – humans get the readable version, the system gets perfect data.
• AI reads PDFs and photos. The same AI invoice extraction used everywhere in Verifical reads scanned and native PDFs, photographed receipts, and image attachments — pulling out every field that matters for bookkeeping.
• E-invoices are parsed instantly. Structured XML invoices (Peppol/UBL, ISDOC, and others) are read directly from the source data with no AI cost. See incoming e-invoices for the full list of supported formats.
• Email body becomes a note. The first part of the email body is attached as a note on the resulting document, so context (what the supplier wrote, the subject line) isn’t lost. Long emails are shortened. The original email itself isn’t archived – only the relevant attachments are kept as Verifical documents.
• Document type defaults to invoice. If the address has no document-type rule set, structured invoices coming through email are automatically marked as “invoice received” – saving the most common categorisation step for the most common case.

4. You review and confirm before anything reaches the accountant

This is the part most email-collection tools don’t mention. Verifical doesn’t post documents to your accountant’s queue automatically. Every document — whether it came in as a Peppol invoice, a PDF, or a phone photo — sits in your “needs confirmation” queue first.

You see what was extracted, you check it against the original, and you approve, edit, or reject. Only then does the document become work for your accountant.

This matters because it’s your money going out the door. You’re the one who decides what gets paid and what gets flagged. The AI is fast, the e-invoice parser is accurate, but neither one substitutes for someone looking at the result and saying “yes, this is a real invoice, from a supplier I expect, for an amount that makes sense – process it.”

If you’d rather skip the manual review entirely, the company has an auto-approve setting that posts documents directly to the accountant as they arrive. It’s all-or-nothing at the company level, off by default. Most businesses leave it off and review each document — the few seconds it takes is worth the visibility.

5. Approved documents go to the accountant

Once you approve a document, it appears in your accountant’s review queue with all the data already extracted, all metadata already attached, and a note carrying the email’s subject and intro for context.

The accountant doesn’t deal with email at all. They open Verifical, see a clean list of documents ready to be exported to your accounting software, and process them. The download-save-rename routine disappears from their workflow.

[Screenshot: the document detail view, showing extracted data and the confirmation/approval panel]

Three ways to use it

The single address turns out to be useful in three different ways depending on who’s doing the work.

Forwarding from the owner’s inbox. The simplest case: an invoice arrives in the owner’s normal email, and they forward it to the Verifical address. One forward instead of download-save-rename-upload. The invoice is in the system within seconds.

Auto-forwarding rules. For businesses that receive a lot of invoices to a predictable email pattern (accounting@, billing@, invoices@), most email providers let you set up a forwarding rule once. From then on, every invoice arrives in Verifical without anyone touching it.

Suppliers CC the Verifical address. This is where the unique address really pays off, especially for recurring suppliers — utilities, telecom, software subscriptions, regular service providers. You give the Verifical address to your suppliers and ask them to CC it on every invoice they send to you (don’t ask them to send only to Verifical). After that, invoices arrive in Verifical without you having to forward anything.

We recommend CC rather than direct send for one practical reason: when the supplier CCs your Verifical address, the original email still lands in your normal inbox too. You keep the full message, with all its context, in the place you’d normally look for it. Verifical takes the attachment and processes it. Both sides get what they need.

This third path is also where Verifical’s email collection overlaps with the supplier portal. Suppliers who prefer the portal get a portal. Suppliers who prefer email keep using email. Both paths land in the same place, both go through the same review-and-approve gate.

Why the address belongs to the business, not the accountant

The Verifical email address belongs to the company you set up in Verifical, not to the accountant who works on its books.

That detail matters more than it sounds. If the company changes accountants (which happens), the Verifical address stays the same. Suppliers don’t need to be told anything. Auto-forwarding rules don’t need to be rebuilt. The new accountant inherits the same flow on day one.

This is different from how forwarding addresses work in tools like Hubdoc, where the address is tied to the bookkeeper account. In Verifical, the email belongs to the business. The accountant is the one processing what’s been confirmed, but the inbox itself is the company’s, and it persists for as long as the business does.