Invoice Processing from Email

Overview

This flow automates the front-end of accounts-payable invoice intake. When a new email arrives in a shared mailbox with invoice in the subject and at least one attachment, the flow filters down to PDF attachments, saves them to a date-foldered OneDrive location, extracts vendor / invoice number / amount / due-date from the email body, logs a row to a SharePoint Invoice Tracker list, and conditionally routes high-value invoices to a Finance approver before notifying the Accounts Payable team. Lower-value invoices are auto-approved so the AP team only sees an FYI.

Use Case

Finance and AP teams spend a disproportionate amount of time triaging invoice emails — opening each one, downloading the PDF, copying header fields into a tracker, and chasing approvals for anything that looks large. This flow centralizes the triage: a single mailbox becomes the intake, every PDF is archived in a predictable monthly folder, every invoice is logged with a consistent schema, and the only invoices that require a human decision are the ones above the configured approval threshold. The result is faster intake, an audit trail, and less manual data entry.

The flow is ideal for teams that:

• Finance / Accounts Payable teams that receive invoices by email and want a tracker without changing how vendors send them
• Organizations standardizing invoice intake before rolling out a full AP automation platform
• Teams that need an approval gate for high-value invoices but want low-value ones to flow through automatically
• Anyone wanting a date-foldered OneDrive archive of incoming invoice PDFs

Flow Architecture

Environment Variables

Connectors & Connections

Note — All connections are referenced as solution connection references; the flow is portable between environments as long as a connection is mapped at import time.

Customization Guide

Almost every realistic variant of this flow can be implemented by changing environment variable values. A few cases require small edits inside the flow definition — those are called out explicitly below.

Promote thresholds and recipients to env vars

Move the subject keyword, OneDrive archive root, SharePoint list name, high-value threshold, approver email, and AP notification email to the environment variables shipped with the solution so the flow can be retargeted per environment without editing actions.

Use AI Builder for field extraction

Replace the Compose-based regex extraction with an AI Builder Invoice Processing model for more reliable vendor / invoice-number / amount / due-date extraction, especially when invoice formats vary across vendors.

Add duplicate detection

Before creating the SharePoint item, query the Invoice Tracker list by invoice number and short-circuit (or flag) duplicates so the same invoice is not logged twice when vendors re-send.

Weekly outstanding-invoice summary

Add a sibling scheduled flow that runs weekly, queries the Invoice Tracker for items still in Received or Approved status, and emails a digest to Finance.

Key Expressions

The flow is intentionally light on Power Fx / WDL gymnastics — the heaviest expressions are the branch-name concatenation and the approval outcome check. They are listed below in the order they appear in the flow.

endsWith(items('Apply_to_each')?['name'], '.pdf')

formatDateTime(utcNow(), 'yyyy-MM')