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Supplier Matching

Introduction

This article will help you get better supplier matching when using the Invoice Inbox.

 

How it Works

1. The receive email address identifies the business unit
2. The sender’s email address should identify the suppliers (unless it’s your own or a generic one like Xero)
3. A match of the email address is attempted – having excluded email addresses populated is essential
4. If we can’t match the email address we will look at the OCR results from our provider –  what do they think it is? They will often look up the supplier in Companies House (or international equivalents) and provide the exact name – this could differ from your own name in Zahara – we attempt a fuzzy match
5. If we can’t get a match here, we will state it as unknown. 

What Can Go Wrong

Email address saving 
With the Zahara Inbox, there is a tick box to save/not save the email address against the supplier record, which makes life easier. This means you can save email addresses as you go rather than spending time populating your supplier records. However, it is wise to check supplier records for any rogue or incorrect email addresses.

Exclude Email Addresses

If you are using email forwarding, you need to add your email address into the Ignore email box in Business Settings > Invoices Inbox as shown below. Multiple email addresses can be added

 
 

Email Failed

Let’s say for some reason we simply can’t get a match on the email address – perhaps the email is encrypted and there is no text in the email to read. We are now relying on the supplier name from the OCR results. Is it exact? Do you have the exact legal name correct? If you do, we should match it. If not you can check what we have populated in the SmartName field of the supplier record. You can then change the supplier name to this value to facilitate exact matching the next time an invoice is received. 

 

SmartName

In the example of Kia Contract Hire below, their monthly invoice is posted to us. It is scanned and emailed to Zahara. As a result, we cannot match the email address. The OCR service identifies it as SOCIETE GENERALE. This can be confusing but provided that value is populated in the SmartName field, you will still get a supplier match. 

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