Buyer/Seller classification

Kofax AP Essentials can sort invoices according to which buyer or seller organization they belong. This means, for example, if a customer has multiple buyer organizations, you can match invoices to the appropriate buyer organizations. You can specify the buyer/seller organization that an invoice belongs to manually, or you can let Kofax AP Essentials determine the organization automatically. You enable buyer/seller classification in the Classification service settings.

Whether you use buyer or seller classification depends on which document process you use. For accounts payable processes, you deal with buyers, whereas accounts receivable processes deal with sellers. For the purposes of this help topic, the terms buyer and seller can be used interchangeably.

Manual classification

You can perform manual classification in the Upload view by selecting the appropriate buyer/seller in the box when uploading invoices. You can also change the buyer/seller during verification.

Automatic classification

If you provide Kofax AP Essentials with identifying information about your buyers/sellers, such as names and tax registration numbers, Kofax AP Essentials can perform classification automatically by finding buyer/seller information on incoming invoices. In other words, in order for automatic classification to work properly, the buyer/seller information you provide must appear on the invoices you receive. Kofax AP Essentials automatically classifies invoices by buyer/seller if you:

Select Automatic classification in the Buyer/Seller box when uploading invoices.
Upload invoices to the customer level using AP Essentials Connect. Note that if you upload invoices to the root customer folder, without using buyer/seller subfolders, a Default document type must be specified.
Email invoices to the customer level.
If you use automatic classification, read about handling unclassified documents in the section below.

The more information you provide about each buyer/seller, the better the result. You can add buyer/seller information:

Using AP Essentials Connect to upload master data.
Manually when you create buyers/sellers in the Admin Center.
Via the API.

Buyer classification Kofax AP Essentials uses the buyer settings/seller settings below to match invoices to buyers. The names of the corresponding master-data elements follow in parentheses:

Name (Name)
Organization number (OrganizationNumber)
VAT number (VatNumber)
Phone (PhoneNumber)
Fax (Fax)
Street address (AddressStreetAddress)
Post code (AddressPostcode)
City (AddressCity)
State (AddressState)
Country (AddressCountry)
Alternative name 1 (AlternativeName1)
Alternative name 2 (AlternativeName2)
Alternative name 3 (AlternativeName3)

How it works

When Kofax AP Essentials receives a new invoice, it looks for all of the fields above. The more fields that Kofax AP Essentials finds, the greater the confidence. If the confidence is high, the buyer/seller field status is Complete (). If the confidence is low, Kofax AP Essentials suggests a field value, but the status is highlighted for manual verification ().

Do you have multiple organizations with similar names?

Sometimes you can have multiple buyer/seller organizations with similar names. For example, you might have a buyer named "Example US Corp" and another named "Example EU Corp." This can cause problems:

if both names appear on an invoice.
if the fuzzy logic which is used to identify buyers cannot decide which buyer to use.

To solve this problem, you can give one or more buyers/sellers a lower priority by typing "careof" in one of the alternative name settings.

Handling unclassified documents

When AP Essentials cannot classify a document correctly, the document is assigned to the customer account rather than a buyer or seller. If no users have access to the customer account, unclassified documents will not appear in the document list view and possibly go unnoticed. Use one or both of the following methods to ensure unclassified documents do not get lost in this manner:

When assigning buyers to users, select Access all buyers (current and future) for at least one user. With this setting enabled, users can see unclassified documents that are assigned to the customer account.
When assigning buyers to users, select Allow access to unclassified documents for at least one user. With this setting enabled, users can see unclassified documents that are assigned to the customer account. However, when using this method, users can only assign unclassified documents to buyers/sellers they have access to. For example, using the settings below, the user has access to unclassified documents, but can only change the buyer of an unclassified document to ACME America Inc. or ACME China. ACME England Corp. is not available because the user does not have access to it.