Incoming documents in Business Central

Most vendor invoices still arrive as PDFs attached to emails. Most companies still type the data into the system manually. Business Central's Incoming Documents feature is the platform's attempt to bridge that gap — receive the PDF, extract the data, post it as a purchase invoice or other transaction, with audit trail and rejection workflow for the cases AI gets wrong.

The flow.

1. Receive. A document (typically a PDF) arrives in BC as an Incoming Document. Sources include: emails to a dedicated inbox monitored by an Office 365 integration, manual upload by AP staff, OCR vendor service push, or attachment to an existing record via the general document attachments mechanism, which is the simpler, non-AP-automation way to keep a file next to any record.

2. OCR / AI processing. The document is processed — either by Microsoft's built-in OCR service, by a third-party OCR partner integration (Continia, ExFlow, others), or by the modern path using AI Builder document automation for richer extraction. The output is structured: vendor identification, invoice number, date, total amount, line-by-line if available, VAT breakdown.

3. Vendor matching. The extracted vendor identity (name, VAT number, bank details) is matched to a BC vendor. Match confidence is shown; for unrecognised vendors, AP staff create or select.

4. Document creation. The user opens the Incoming Document, reviews the extracted data, and creates the corresponding business document — typically a purchase invoice but also purchase credit memos, general journal lines, or other supported document types.

5. Review and post. The created document is reviewed, possibly approved through workflow, then posted. The Incoming Document remains linked to the posted document for audit.

OCR options.

• Microsoft built-in — basic OCR, free, works for clean PDFs and simple layouts. Best for low-volume.
• Microsoft AI-document-processing — newer, with AI Builder backend. More accurate, supports more layouts.
• Continia OCR / Lexmark / Rossum / similar — third-party services accessed via partner connectors, generally more accurate especially for varied or complex invoice layouts. Higher accuracy, paid per page.

AP automation as a category

For high-volume AP teams (hundreds of invoices per day), BC's built-in Incoming Documents covers the basics, but most serious operations layer a dedicated AP automation ISV (Continia Document Capture, ExFlow, Documotor, ABBYY-based solutions). They add:

• Line-level item-and-amount matching to purchase orders.
• Three-way matching (PO ↔ receipt ↔ invoice).
• Per-vendor field-mapping templates that learn over time.
• Complex multi-step approval workflows beyond BC's built-in.
• Dashboards for exception handling.

Approval workflow

Incoming Documents integrate with the BC workflow engine: rules can require approval before the document can be converted into a posted business document, with conditional routing based on amount, vendor, or department.

Audit trail

Every Incoming Document keeps its original PDF plus the OCR output. Posted documents retain the link, so an auditor seeing a posted purchase invoice can drill back to the original PDF.

Beyond purchase invoices

Incoming Documents can also handle bank statements (for some country imports), expense receipts, and customer documents inbound for the case where the customer sends their PO as an attachment for the seller's reference.

The realistic adoption pattern

Start with manual upload and AP review. As volume grows and patterns stabilise, layer OCR. Beyond a few hundred invoices a week, look at a dedicated AP automation ISV.