What's new

New features are deployed to the US, Asia, and Australia on Monday, May 19; and to Europe on Tuesday, May 20.

• The advanced interpretation engine is now generally available for all customers. The advanced engine is enabled by default on all new partner accounts. Existing partner accounts are unaffected.

• The Malaysian document type now interprets QR codes and extracts relevant information to document fields.

• You can now use the line-item row count in custom validation rules. A new system field, LineItem.RowCount, lets you reference the number of line items in your validation expressions. This is useful, for example, for skipping validations when no line items are present.

• The Extraction service now supports XML document subtypes. Previously, only a generic XML document type was available. Now all three subtypes (Purchase order invoice, Expense invoice, Credit note) are available for XML documents. This enhancement allows automatic document classification of XML documents and enables a more refined application of validation rules for XML documents, offering greater flexibility and precision in XML processing.

• AP Essentials Connect has been updated to version 2025.1.5.8102.

• VAT rates have been updated for South African document types. Up-to-date VAT rates increase interpretation rates and improve internal validation rules.

• Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations integration

  The integration now supports exporting original emails to Dynamics 365. This feature lets you retain the full email context alongside invoice data, which improves traceability and auditability. The new setting, Export original email, is available in the target system settings.

  You can now determine which Dynamics 365 field populates the item master data in AP Essentials. Previously, item master data was synchronized with product numbers. Now, you can use the Item number mapping source setting to choose between the Item number or Product number field when mapping item master data.

  The integration is now certified for Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations version 10.0.43.

• Coupa AP integration

  The integration has a new setting, Simplified Coupa XML without lines, that omits invoice lines and tax lines from Coupa XML while replacing lines and header tax lines with empty collections. This feature can be helpful if you use custom XSLT transformations to generate line items and header tax lines dynamically based on header data and other sources.

  The behavior of the Use supplier sites setting has improved. Now, if Coupa provides a supplier site address, it is used instead of always importing the main supplier address.

New features are deployed to the US, Asia, and Australia on Monday, April 14. New features are deployed to Europe on Tuesday, April 15.

• Several improvements have been made to the advanced extraction engine, including interpretation improvements for languages—such as Chinese and Japanese—that do not use spaces between words. These updates improve accuracy when extracting data from documents in these languages.

• The NetSuite integration now supports posting non-PO invoice lines as item lines when an item code is specified during verification. This feature allows better control over how non-PO invoices are handled in NetSuite while maintaining backward compatibility.

New features are deployed to the US on Monday, March 17. New features are deployed to Europe, Asia, and Australia on Tuesday, March 18.

• The Extraction service now offers a new interpretation method, called the Advanced engine, which improves the interpretation of noisy images and handwriting. Unlike the Classic engine, the Advanced engine currently does not support searchable PDF output. This feature is available on a private preview basis.

• AP Essentials now supports ZUGFeRD 2.3 XML input, as well as Factur-X 1.0 and XRechnung 3.0.

• VAT rates have been updated for several countries such as Estonia, Finland, Israel, Norway, Slovakia, and Turkey. Up-to-date VAT rates increase interpretation rates and improve internal validation rules.

• The SAP S/4HANA Cloud ES integration now supports the import of work breakdown structure (WBS) master data. The WBS data can be connected to fields and used for field value suggestions, validation, and export to SAP.

• The Coupa AP integration now supports the configuration of the tax registration number source when importing supplier master data. You can also specify the priority of the sources, ensuring that the most relevant tax number is used.

• The Coupa AP integration supports new field mappings for PO master data.

• The NetSuite integration is now certified for NetSuite version 2025.01. You must update the NetSuite bundle to take advantage of the latest improvements. If you use token-based authentication, you must add the Accounting Lists permission to your role and set the Level setting to View.

• AP Essentials Connect has been updated to version 2025.1.3.8085.

• AP Essentials Connect no longer supports Windows Server 2012, as it has reached its end of life.

New features are deployed to the US on Monday, February 17. New features are deployed to Europe, Asia, and Australia on Tuesday, February 18.

• Many document types now recognize alternative spellings and additional abbreviations of month names. These improvements enhance accuracy and reduce the need for manual verification.

• Manual verification has been further streamlined by optimizing extraction validation rules for header fields. Previously, overlapping internal validations caused confusion by triggering validation warnings for seemingly disabled rules. This update reduces both manual verification and overall verification time.

• The SAP S/4HANA Cloud ES integration now supports enhanced 3-way matching. This improvement ensures that goods receipts are validated against the corresponding purchase order and invoice, and the goods receipt number is included in the posted invoice.

• The Coupa AP integration is now certified for Coupa version R41.

New features are deployed to the US on Monday, January 20. New features are deployed to Europe, Asia, and Australia on Tuesday, January 21.

• New versions of the AP Essentials add-ins for Microsoft Excel are now available in the Microsoft Store. If you use these apps, you must update to the latest version, as the old versions are no longer available. Updates may occur automatically, depending on your Excel version.

  • Reports for Microsoft Excel (AP Essentials Reports)

  • Data Import for Microsoft Excel (AP Essentials Data Import)

• The Coupa AP integration has two new features.

  • Exchange rates in currency master data — The integration can determine the base currency automatically via the default chart of accounts in Coupa. Alternatively, you can specify a single base currency for all buyers or different base currencies for individual buyers.

  • Automatic net amount calculation — If the net amount (InvoiceTotalVatExcludedAmount) is missing, it is automatically calculated by subtracting InvoiceTotalVATAmount from InvoiceTotalVatIncludedAmount.

New features are deployed to the US on Tuesday, January 7. New features are deployed to Europe, Asia, and Australia on Wednesday, January 8.

• A new service, Tungsten Copilot, is available that lets you incorporate generative AI capabilities with AP Essentials Office. This feature lets users ask natural language questions, such as "How much did we buy from this supplier last month?" or "What is the average total cost on invoices from this supplier?" Tungsten Copilot interprets the queries and returns relevant results, streamlining your verification and approval processes.

• Extraction validation rules have been optimized even further, resulting in less manual verification and reduced verification time.

• New metrics (sender number, lock online learning, and bypass verification) enhance the Verification Touch Rate report by providing deeper insights into document performance. Knowing the sender number helps identify problematic senders for targeted troubleshooting. Seeing whether online learning is locked highlights if poor performance is due to restricted learning, while understanding whether verification is bypassed explains unusually high zero-touch rates. Both offer clearer insights into automation levels and anomalies.

  The new metrics apply only to documents processed after this release. Existing sender rows will not be retroactively updated with the new metrics. Instead, new rows will be created. This means that within the date range of your report, the same sender might appear twice—once with metrics up to the release date and again with the new metrics starting from the release date.

• The Mobile Approval interface is now more intuitive and efficient, providing an improved user experience.

• The SAP S/4HANA Cloud ES integration now supports posting purchase order invoices that contain service lines with and without service entry sheets. New settings allow invoices to be parked automatically when service entry sheets (SES) are missing, unapproved, or ambiguous. This ensures smoother invoice processing by reducing rejection rates and enabling manual resolution of SES-related issues.

• AP Essentials Connect has been updated to version 2025.1.0.8074.

New features are deployed to the US on Monday, November 11. New features are deployed to Europe, Asia, and Australia on Tuesday, November 12.

• Manual verification has been further streamlined by optimizing extraction validation rules for the invoice number field. The result is less manual verification and reduced verification time.

• The Coupa AP integration has several new features.

  • You can now apply Content group filtering to contracts, so only contracts that belong to the content groups specified in the Content group mapping settings are imported.

  • It is now possible to exclude contracts by contract number during master data import. It is helpful, for example, to exclude the pucnhout catalog to prevent duplicate contract numbers from being imported. The new setting is called Excluded contract numbers.

  • The Replace invalid characters setting helps ensure smooth master-data import by automatically replacing invalid characters, such as line breaks, with the character you specify. This reduces import failures, making the process more efficient and reliable.

  • Delta synchronization has been improved to include suppliers whose sub-entities have changed. This enhancement ensures the latest supplier master data is retrieved from Coupa.

  • Purchase order synchronization no longer excludes POs from inactive accounts. In other words, POs from inactive accounts are now imported.

• The NetSuite integration now supports general ledger coding for PO invoices and credit notes.

• The Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations integration is now certified for Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations version 10.0.41.

• The SAP S/4HANA Cloud ES integration supports automatic multiple-account assignment of purchase order lines.

New features are deployed to the US on Monday, October 7. New features are deployed to Europe, Asia, and Australia on Tuesday, October 8.

• Manual verification has been streamlined by optimizing extraction validation rules. The result is less manual verification and reduced verification time.

• The user experience in AP Essentials Office has been enhanced by adding more context-sensitive help links to dialogs throughout the application.

• AP Essentials Connect was updated to version 10.6.14.8045.

• The Oracle Financials Cloud integration has been enhanced to automatically classify line types as goods or services based on the quantity and price fields.

• The NetSuite integration is now certified for NetSuite version 2024.2.

• The Coupa AP integration is now certified for Coupa version R40.

Looking for older news? See the archives for release notes dating back to October 25, 2011.