Invoice email forwarding

Email forwarding turns supplier invoice emails into receipts. Each Standard and Pro kitchen has its own Rinvy address. Forward an invoice there, and Rinvy reads the PDF, matches each line to a product, and puts a draft receipt in your review queue. You check the lines and approve.

Forwarding pays off once 5 to 10 supplier invoices arrive each week, too many to type in one by one on the manual receive screen. The free invoice scan that builds your product catalog during setup is a different feature. That scan creates products, not receipts.

Invoice ingestion is included on Standard (40 included, up to 50 invoice scans a month, and you review each one) and Pro (300 included, up to 600 invoice scans a month, with optional auto-approve — see below).

How it works

Your kitchen's forwarding address looks like kitchenname-1a2b3c4d@rinvy.app. When a supplier email lands there, Rinvy:

1. Receives the email via the Resend inbound webhook.
2. Takes the first PDF attachment (or, with no PDF, the email body) and sends it 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. The parsed invoice shows up under Pending on the Receive screen, tagged with how many lines still need a product match.

Setup

1. Go to Kitchen Settings and choose Integrations.

2. Find your Forwarding email in the Invoice intake 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.

In Outlook, an inbox rule can pass your suppliers' mail on to the Rinvy address. Microsoft's guide to forwarding with inbox rules explains the two actions. Redirect to keeps the supplier as the sender, and Forward to makes the message come from you. Pick Redirect to when you can. Rinvy reads the sender first, and mail from sysco.com or usfoods.com links straight to your supplier named Sysco or US Foods. Forwarded mail still works: Rinvy then looks for the supplier in the subject line and in the supplier name printed on the invoice.

Rinvy also learns from your review. When you set the supplier on an emailed invoice, Rinvy remembers the sender. The next invoice from that sender gets that supplier when the subject line and the invoice itself name no supplier Rinvy knows. The supplier name printed on the invoice always wins over a remembered sender. So a shared mailbox that forwards invoices from many suppliers, such as orders@yourrestaurant.com, still gets each invoice's own supplier. For a sender on a shared mail service such as Gmail or Outlook, Rinvy remembers the full address, not the domain. Rinvy never learns the login address of someone on your team. See upload and review to remove a sender.

In Gmail, a filter can forward your suppliers' mail to the Rinvy address. Gmail asks you to confirm the address first:

1. In Gmail, open Settings, then See all settings, then Forwarding and POP/IMAP. Click Add a forwarding address and paste the Rinvy address.

2. Gmail sends a confirmation code to the Rinvy address. Rinvy does not read it as an invoice. It emails the code and the confirm link to the kitchen's owners, and sends a notification to owners and managers.

3. Open the confirm link in that email, or enter the code in Gmail's forwarding settings.

4. To forward only invoices, create a Gmail filter (for example, mail from your supplier's domain) and choose Forward it to the Rinvy address. Google's guide to forwarding Gmail messages has the details.

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 Needs review. 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.
• Codes printed a little differently: a supplier can print one code as 0123456 on one invoice and 123-456 on the next. Within the same supplier, Rinvy ignores spaces, dashes, dots, letter case and leading zeros when it looks up a code, so both match the product you mapped once. If two of your products would match that way, the line goes to review instead. A code from another supplier never matches this way. A line matched this way is filled in, but the invoice always goes to review, even with auto-approve on. When you commit it, Rinvy learns the code as printed, so the next invoice that prints it can auto-approve.
• Lines with no item code: produce vendors, small suppliers and order emails often print no code. When you map such a line and commit the invoice, Rinvy remembers how that supplier describes it, for example CHS CHDR SHRD. Letter case, spacing and punctuation do not matter. The next invoice from the same supplier that prints the same description shows the line as Matched. A description from another supplier never matches this way. If a line matched the wrong product, press Remove match in review, and Rinvy forgets that description.
• Ambiguous matches: if name alone isn't enough, click Map to product to see all your products, or type part of a name to filter the list. Then pick the right product. Every word you type must appear in the product's name or its supplier's name, in any order, so beef fresh finds Ground Beef from Fresh Farms.

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

Auto-approve

Auto-approve is a Pro feature. If every line item matches a known product code, an ingestion can auto-approve — the receipt is created without needing review. Turn on Auto-approve invoices in Kitchen Settings → Integrations → Invoice intake if you're comfortable with the matching accuracy. On Standard the toggle is locked and every invoice goes through review.

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

Auto-approve also needs to know the supplier. If Rinvy can't tell which supplier sent the invoice, the invoice goes to review with its matches filled in, because two suppliers can use the same item code for different products. A line with no unit printed on the invoice also goes to review, marked Confirm unit. So does a line whose item code matched only after Rinvy ignored spaces, dashes, dots, letter case or leading zeros: only a code that matches exactly as printed can auto-approve. When the AI cannot read a line's unit or item code clearly (smudged, cut off or handwritten), the line goes to review too. An unclear unit shows Confirm unit. An unclear item code keeps its match filled in for you to check.

A line that matched by its description, with no item code, auto-approves only after you committed that description on two invoices. Two lines with the same description on one invoice count once. The first time a remembered description matches, the invoice goes to review with the line filled in. When you commit it, that counts as the second confirmation. So the third invoice from the supplier can auto-approve when everything else on it matches.

A line that prints an item code Rinvy has not learned never auto-approves by its description. Suppliers often keep the description and change the code for a substitute or a new pack size. So Rinvy fills in the remembered product and sends the invoice to review. When you commit it, Rinvy learns the new code.

A price far from what you last paid also stops auto-approve. If a line costs more than 50% above or below the last price you paid for that product, in the same unit, the invoice goes to review. This catches a price per pound read as a price per case. A product you never priced does not stop auto-approve.

An auto-approved invoice names no place for its stock. If a product is counted in more than one place, the stock goes to its home storage area. See count a product in more than one place.

Why didn't a forwarded invoice become a receipt?

A forwarded invoice that has no receipt yet is waiting for you under Pending, or it failed and is listed under History with a red Failed chip and a short reason. Even with good setup, some invoices need attention:

• New product the supplier started carrying — appears as Needs review. Map to an existing product or create a new one.
• Renamed product — code changed; appears as Needs review. 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.
• Two invoices in one email: Rinvy reads only the first PDF attachment. Forward each invoice in its own email.

What happens to invoices past the monthly scan limit?

Rinvy keeps every invoice past the limit and parses it later. The email is never dropped, and the owner and managers get a notification. The same hold applies when a sudden flood of forwarded emails arrives in a single day, on every plan, Pro included.

Privacy

Rinvy sends the PDF to Anthropic's API for parsing. By default, Anthropic does not train its models on what customers send through its commercial API (Anthropic Privacy Center). Rinvy keeps the original document so you can open it from review and, after you commit the invoice, from the receipt in History. A committed invoice keeps its document for as long as the kitchen exists. Rinvy deletes the document of a duplicate right away, and the document of an invoice that failed or was dismissed 90 days after it arrived. When a kitchen is deleted, Rinvy deletes all of its documents. The email itself is stored in Rinvy's database for audit. See our privacy policy.

Related

• Upload and review invoices
• Receive a delivery manually