Automated Document Acquisition from Email
Data Alchemy runs automated document acquisition from email: it connects your Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 mailboxes, pulls invoices, delivery notes, orders and price lists received as attachments on its own, discards spam and signatures, extracts the data with AI and posts it into your ERP. An end-to-end flow with no manual forwarding, no PDF downloads, 99.8% accuracy in 3 seconds per document.
What automated email document acquisition is
Automated email document acquisition is the process that pulls business documents straight from email, without anyone having to open the inbox, save the attachments and upload them by hand. Most documents — supplier invoices, delivery notes, order confirmations, price lists — still arrive by email as PDF or XML attachments. Data Alchemy connects natively to Google Workspace (Gmail) and Microsoft 365 (Outlook/Exchange), monitors dedicated mailboxes (e.g. invoices@, orders@, dn@), recognises which emails contain real documents and pulls their attachments. From there the flow continues on its own: an LLM dedicated to each document model — today Claude AI, which outperformed GPT, Gemma and DeepSeek in our tests — extracts the header and line items, validates the data against master data and writes it into SAP, Zucchetti or TeamSystem. The team no longer downloads attachments or forwards emails to the ERP: it only handles exceptions.
Which emails and documents it acquires automatically
Data Alchemy connects to your business mailboxes and tells useful documents apart from the rest of the mail, pulling only what the ERP needs.
Mailboxes and providers
- Google Workspace (Gmail) native via OAuth
- Microsoft 365 (Outlook / Exchange Online)
- Dedicated mailboxes: invoices@, orders@, dn@
- Multiple mailboxes and domains for group companies
Document types
- Supplier invoices (PDF, XML, FatturaPA)
- Delivery notes and shipping documents
- Order confirmations and acknowledgements
- Price lists, contracts and quotes
Attachment formats
- Native PDFs and scanned PDFs (OCR)
- XML and FatturaPA
- Images (JPG, PNG) and digital faxes
- Multiple attachments and compressed archives
Smart filters
- Automatic discard of spam and newsletters
- Exclusion of signatures, logos and disclaimers
- Recognition of documents in the email body
- Deduplication of re-sent emails
Email document acquisition in 5 steps
From the inbox to posting in the ERP, Data Alchemy automates the whole flow with no manual forwarding and no attachment downloads.
1. Connect the mailbox
You securely connect your Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 mailboxes via OAuth. No client to install: you choose which addresses to monitor (e.g. invoices@, orders@).
2. Monitoring and pulling
The platform watches the incoming mail, recognises the emails that contain real documents and pulls their attachments, discarding spam, newsletters, signatures and irrelevant files.
3. Data extraction
A dedicated LLM reads the header and line items and extracts supplier, amounts, VAT, items, quantities and prices from PDF, XML and FatturaPA, with no per-sender template.
4. Master-data validation
The extracted data is compared in real time with ERP master data — suppliers, items, price lists — and every deviation or duplicate becomes a flagged exception.
5. Posting into the ERP
Compliant documents are posted into SAP, Zucchetti or TeamSystem; anomalous ones stay in review. The source email remains tracked as an attachment of the document.
Everything you need for email document acquisition
Native Google and Microsoft connectors
Direct connection to Gmail (Google Workspace) and Outlook/Exchange (Microsoft 365) via OAuth: no manual forwarding, no IMAP mailbox to configure by hand.
Multi-mailbox monitoring
Monitors different mailboxes and domains in parallel — invoices@, orders@, dn@ — even across multiple group companies, routing each document to the right flow.
Real-document recognition
The AI tells emails with documents apart from spam, newsletters and signatures, and recognises the document both as an attachment and in the message body, with no rules to maintain.
Built-in extraction and validation
Acquisition does not stop at pulling: attachments are immediately extracted, validated against master data and posted into the ERP, in a single end-to-end flow.
Deduplication and traceability
Re-sent emails are deduplicated and every document keeps the reference to its source message, sender and date, for audit and controlling.
Pay-per-use, no subscription
You pay per use, from €0.50/document to €0.35/document, with no monthly fee and no minimum commitment: you pay only for the documents the AI acquires and processes.
How to connect the mailbox to the ERP, step by step
Configuration typically takes half a day on the mail side and 2 to 5 business days for the ERP connection. These are the six steps, in the order they should be done: skipping the first is the mistake that derails most projects.
Create a dedicated mailbox and tell your suppliers
A mailbox such as invoices@, orders@ or dn@ is the single entry point. Communicate it to the suppliers and customers who write to personal inboxes today, and set an automatic forwarding rule from those inboxes to the dedicated one, so the flow does not depend on who is on holiday. As long as documents sit across three personal addresses, automation only covers part of the volume.
Connect the mailbox over OAuth
The connection to Google Workspace (Gmail) or Microsoft 365 (Outlook / Exchange Online) happens over OAuth: access is authorised from the admin console, with no local client to install, no password sharing and no inbound ports to open. The authorisation can be revoked at any time from the mail provider's panel.
Define the monitoring scope
You decide which folders and labels to monitor, which date to start from and which senders need special handling. Multiple mailboxes and domains can be monitored in parallel — one per group company, for instance — keeping each entity's document flows separate.
Set up recognition of real documents
The system tells emails carrying real documents apart from newsletters, spam, signatures, logos and disclaimers, and recognises the document both as an attachment — PDF, FatturaPA XML, images — and inside the message body. This is also where you decide how to treat multiple attachments and emails carrying several document types at once.
Map the fields to the ERP and enable validation
This is the step that takes the 2-5 business days: mapping extracted fields onto ERP fields, line items included, connecting supplier and item master data for real-time validation, defining tolerance thresholds and enabling duplicate detection on re-sent emails.
Go live in parallel and measure
For two or three weeks the automated flow runs alongside the manual one on the same messages, so every posting can be compared and rules and thresholds refined on real cases. Then the manual flow is switched off and you measure: share of emails captured, documents posted with no intervention, minutes saved per document.
None of these steps requires software development on your side: the technical work ends with the OAuth authorisation, done by the mail administrator, and the mapping configuration, done together with our team and the consultant who looks after your ERP.
Four ways to get attachments from email into the ERP
People trying to automate this step almost always try the first three routes before reaching the fourth. It is worth knowing in advance where each one stops.
| Manual saving | Mail rules and shared folders | No-code automations | Native IDP connector | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it does | A person opens the mail, saves the attachment, renames it and uploads it | Emails are automatically sorted into folders or a shared drive | A Zapier- or Power Automate-style flow copies the attachment into a folder or system | The platform monitors the mailbox, pulls, extracts, validates and posts into the ERP |
| What is left to do by hand | Everything: reading, typing, validating, posting | Everything except sorting: the file is tidy but the data does not exist yet | Reading and typing: the file moved, the data did not | Only reviewing the flagged exceptions |
| Recognises spam and signatures | The person does | No: logos and disclaimers land in the folder as attachments | Only with rigid rules on sender or subject | Yes, it tells real documents apart from the rest of the mail |
| Handles duplicates | From memory | No | No, unless custom logic is built | Yes, it deduplicates re-sent emails and already-posted documents |
| Extracts the data | No | No | No | Yes, header and line items |
| Writes into the ERP | By typing | No | Files only, not records | Yes, as a validated record in SAP, Zucchetti, TeamSystem, Dynamics 365 BC, NetSuite |
| Where it stops | At the cost: 4-6 minutes per document do not disappear | At filing: the data entry problem is untouched | At transfer: it moves files, it does not solve transcription | At exceptions, which stay at 5-15% and need a dedicated review queue |
The first three routes are not useless: tidying the mail is the first step anyway, and it is exactly point 01 of the configuration. The point is that they stop before the step that actually costs — turning an attachment into a posted record.
Rossum, ABBYY, Amazon Textract and Data Alchemy on the mailbox → ERP leg
The solutions most often named for this question do not all do the same thing: some start from an already uploaded document, some from a mailbox, others are APIs somebody has to orchestrate. We do not repeat other people's percentages here — they would not be comparable — but show where each one picks the document up, and the question that reveals the most during evaluation.
| Solution | Where it picks the document up | The question that reveals the most |
|---|---|---|
| Data Alchemy | Native connector to Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 mailboxes over OAuth: it monitors the dedicated addresses, recognises real documents, discards spam and signatures, deduplicates resends, extracts header and line items, validates against master data and posts into SAP, Zucchetti, TeamSystem, Dynamics 365 BC or NetSuite. | Ask us for the share of documents posted with no intervention starting from the mailbox — not from a PDF already picked and cleaned — and across every document family, not just invoices. |
| Rossum | Cloud accounts payable automation platform: it provides a dedicated mailbox invoices can be forwarded to, which then become documents to validate in its own interface. | What happens to documents that are not invoices — delivery notes, order confirmations, price lists — and who writes the result into an Italian ERP? |
| ABBYY | Enterprise IDP platform with configurable multichannel capture, email included, and on-premise deployment options. | How much configuration does the email channel need for our senders and layouts, who maintains it over time, and what happens when a supplier changes format? |
| Amazon Textract | AWS document analysis API. It has no mail connector: the email has to be intercepted and stored upstream (for example with SES, S3 and Lambda) and the result then carried into the ERP. | Who builds and who maintains the mailbox → storage → API → ERP orchestration, and how is that work counted in the cost per document? |
Note: Rossum, ABBYY and Amazon Textract are trademarks of their respective owners. This table describes product categories and the point at which each solution enters the flow, not claimed performance: always check current information with the vendor. Where Data Alchemy is not the right choice: if you only need OCR on an already uploaded document, or if the volume is a few dozen documents a month, a native connector and ERP validation are oversized.
The five problems you actually hit, and how they are solved
These are the situations that surface in the first weeks of email automation. Worth knowing upfront, because each has a precise fix and none requires going back to manual work.
| Situation | Why it happens | How it is solved |
|---|---|---|
| Suppliers still write to personal inboxes | The historic contact is a person, not a company address, and changing it takes time. | An automatic forwarding rule from personal inboxes to the dedicated one, plus a note to the top twenty suppliers by document count, who usually cover 70-80% of the volume. |
| One email carries ten different attachments | The supplier sends invoices, delivery notes and non-document material in a single message. | Each attachment is assessed individually and classified by document type: invoices and delivery notes enter their respective flows, the rest is discarded without blocking the message. |
| The same document arrives twice | The supplier re-sends the message, or the same document arrives both by email and through a portal. | Duplicate detection upstream of the write on number, date, supplier and amount, with re-sent emails deduplicated too: the second arrival is linked to the first instead of creating a new posting. |
| The document is in the email body, not attached | Orders and confirmations are often typed straight into the message text. | Recognition is not limited to attachments: the message body is analysed as a document in its own right, with the same header and line extraction. |
| You need the original email months later | A dispute or an audit requires proving when a document arrived and from whom. | Every document keeps the reference to its source message — sender, date, attachment — so the email stays retrievable and linked to the accounting entry. |
The ROI of automated email acquisition
Removing the manual pulling of attachments eliminates a repetitive task and shortens the time between a document arriving and being posted. Here is the typical impact our customers measure.
attachments downloaded and forwarded by hand by the team
accuracy in extracting data from acquired documents
per document, from pulling it off the inbox to posting
mailbox monitoring, even after hours and at weekends
Solutions related to email acquisition
Invoice data extraction
AI reading of header and line items from PDF, XML and FatturaPA, with duplicate checks and master-data validation.
Learn more →AdministrationSupplier invoice automation
The solution built for the finance team: post invoices and entries with no re-keying, validated against the ERP.
Learn more →Anomaly detectionAnomaly and fraud control
Comparison of documents against ERP master data to flag duplicates, off-contract prices and suspicious IBANs.
Learn more →PlatformAll IDP solutions
The IDP platform that brings every module together: invoices, delivery notes, orders, contracts and price lists in one flow into your ERP.
Learn more →Frequently asked questions about email document acquisition
How can I automate the capture of documents arriving by email straight into my ERP?
In six steps. First, create a dedicated mailbox (invoices@ or orders@, for instance) and set automatic forwarding from personal inboxes, so documents stop being scattered across several addresses. Second, connect the Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 mailbox over OAuth from the admin console, with no client to install and no password sharing. Third, define the folders, labels and senders to monitor, across multiple mailboxes and domains if needed. Fourth, enable real-document recognition, which discards spam, newsletters, signatures and logos and reads the document both as an attachment — PDF, FatturaPA XML, images — and in the message body. Fifth, map the extracted fields onto ERP fields, line items included, connect master data for real-time validation and enable duplicate detection; this is the step that typically takes 2 to 5 business days. Sixth, run two or three weeks in parallel with the manual flow, refine thresholds and rules on real cases, then switch the manual one off. From then on attachments become records posted in SAP, Zucchetti, TeamSystem, Dynamics 365 Business Central or NetSuite, and only exceptions reach the team.
Is a mail rule or a no-code automation not enough to move the attachments?
It helps, but it only solves the first piece. A mail rule or a Zapier- or Power Automate-style flow moves the file from a mailbox to a folder: the attachment is tidy, but the data does not exist yet and someone still has to open it and type it in. A native IDP connector goes further: it pulls the attachment, extracts header and line items, validates the data against ERP master records, catches duplicates and writes the record into the ERP, leaving only exceptions to an operator. That is where the entire difference in working hours sits.
What is automated email document acquisition?
It is the process that pulls business documents — invoices, delivery notes, orders, price lists — straight from email, without anyone having to open the inbox, save the attachments and upload them by hand. Data Alchemy connects to Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, recognises the emails that contain real documents, extracts their data with AI and posts it into the ERP.
Which email providers does it integrate with?
Data Alchemy connects natively to Google Workspace (Gmail) and Microsoft 365 (Outlook / Exchange Online) through OAuth, with no local client to install. You can monitor multiple mailboxes and domains at once — for example invoices@, orders@, dn@ — even across several group companies.
How does it tell documents apart from spam and normal emails?
The AI analyses every incoming email and recognises which ones contain real documents, discarding spam, newsletters, signatures, logos and disclaimers. It recognises the document both as an attachment (PDF, XML, FatturaPA, images) and within the message body, and deduplicates re-sent emails, so only what is needed reaches the ERP.
Do the acquired documents go straight into the ERP?
Yes. Email acquisition is only the first step of an end-to-end flow: the pulled attachments are extracted by a dedicated LLM, validated against supplier, item and price-list master data and written straight into SAP, Zucchetti, TeamSystem and other ERPs via native connectors, REST APIs, webhooks and SQL access. Anomalous documents stay in review.
Is the source email kept tracked?
Yes. Every document keeps the reference to its source message — sender, date and attachment — so the email stays available for audit and controlling. Re-sent emails are deduplicated to avoid posting the same document twice.
How much does automated email acquisition cost?
Data Alchemy uses a transparent pay-per-use model: from €0.50/document on the Starter plan down to €0.35/document on the Corporate plan. No monthly subscription, no minimum commitment — you pay only for the documents the AI acquires and processes. Use the ROI calculator to estimate the savings on your real volumes.
See your documents acquired from email live
Book a free 30-minute demo on your real mailboxes and documents. We connect the mail live, show the automatic pulling and the posting into the ERP and calculate your ROI — no commitment, no cost.
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