Invoice email forwarding

Manual receiving works, but it doesn't scale when you get 5–10 supplier invoices a week. Email forwarding turns that pile of PDFs into reviewed receipts with zero typing — forward, glance, approve.

How it works

Every Pro restaurant gets a unique inbound email address (something like kitchenname-abc123@invoices.rinvy.app). When a supplier email lands at that address, Rinvy:

  1. Receives the email via the Resend inbound webhook.
  2. Pulls the PDF attachment(s) and sends them to Claude for parsing.
  3. Extracts supplier name, date, line items (description, supplier item code, quantity, unit, price).
  4. Matches each line item to a product via supplier item codes you've previously confirmed.
  5. Creates a draft receipt and adds it to the review queue.

The whole flow is asynchronous — emails are processed in the background, typically in seconds to a couple minutes for big PDFs.

Setup

  1. Go to Receive products.

  2. Find your invoice forwarding email at the top of the invoice ingestion section. Copy it.

  3. Either set it up as an auto-forward rule in your business email (so supplier emails forward automatically) or ask your suppliers to CC the address on order confirmations.

How matching works

Each line on a parsed invoice has a supplier item code (like SYS-12345). Rinvy looks up that code in product supplier codes — a many-to-one mapping from supplier codes to your product catalog.

  • First-time codes: the line shows as Unmatched. In the review screen you map it to a product. The mapping is saved, so future invoices with the same code auto-match.
  • Known codes: the line shows as Matched with the correct product pre-filled.
  • Ambiguous matches: if name alone isn't enough, you'll see a dropdown to pick the right product.

After a few invoice cycles, most lines auto-match and your review time drops to a glance.

Auto-approve

If every line item matches a known product code, an ingestion can auto-approve — the receipt is created without needing review. Toggle this on the invoice ingestion settings if you're comfortable with the matching accuracy.

Auto-approve is safer than it sounds: it only fires when every line is unambiguously matched. Any unmatched, ambiguous, or anomalous line falls back to manual review.

What can go wrong

Even with good setup, some invoices still need attention:

  • New product the supplier started carrying — appears as Unmatched. Map to an existing product or create a new one.
  • Renamed product — code changed; appears as Unmatched. Re-map.
  • Bad scan — extremely poor PDF quality can confuse the parser. Falls through to manual review with whatever data was extractable.
  • Duplicate detection — if a similar invoice was processed recently, Rinvy flags it as a probable duplicate. Review and decide whether to keep or skip.

Items needing your attention show up in the review queue. Items that succeeded show up in receipt history.

Privacy

The PDF is sent to Anthropic's API for parsing. It isn't retained by Rinvy after extraction and isn't used to train models. The email itself is stored in Rinvy's database for audit. See our privacy policy.

Common mistakes

Forwarding to the wrong address

The forwarding address is per-restaurant — if you manage multiple kitchens, each has its own. Sending a Restaurant A invoice to Restaurant B's address attributes it to the wrong place.

Not setting up supplier item code mappings on first review

The matching pays off on invoice #2 — but only if you confirmed the product mappings on invoice #1. Skipping confirmation means you'll see "Unmatched" forever.

Turning on auto-approve too early

Auto-approve assumes the matchings are right. The first 2–3 invoices from each supplier are when bad mappings get baked in. Wait until you trust the matchings before enabling.

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