Dolibarr as an endpoint for supplier invoices and approval workflow

Using my Dolibarr
1

Hi,
i don’t know dolibarr very well, specially regarding usage, so i’ll be posting some questions i hope they make sense for you and hope that you can help with.

I’d like to have a platform to where my suppliers can send the invoices by email and where the platform can read a mailbox for this purpose.
For each mail retrieved the attached invoice should be extracted and put on a “invoices list” where someone will classify them and “send” them for validation, and after validated it is put on a queue for approval.

Is this the sort of thing dolibarr could do using it’s functionalities and existing plugins?

If yes, is it a complex implementation ?

Thanks and hope i’m not off topic

2

As usual, it depends upon how your business operates whether the software can accommodate your needs or not. Sometimes its easier to adapt your business flow to the software than to rewrite the software.

That said, it seems odd to me that your business would just blindly receive email invoices from your vendors. More than likely, someone initiated an order from that vendor that is ultimately received and paid for.

Dolibarr is certainly capable of issuing a verified “Purchase Order” to the vendor [with all the particulars - prices & quantities]. Dolibarr can then “receive” those items. You then convert that purchase order into a vendor invoice which can be approved before payment.

Hope that helps.

Frank

3

Hello,

To treat PDF invoices, you need basically an OCR.
Natively you do not have it in Dolibarr, but you can use external module like OCR - ScanInvoices

4

Hi @peteredhair
Where are you from?
What you are asking, is essentially the electronic invoice way of auto sending and receiving invoices and other documents.
Coming soon…depending on country…

5

I think it is possible to do what you want to do.

I would look into something like https://www.fetchmail.info/ to handle all the mail pulling. But I am sure that there are also probably at least Python libraries for talking to mail servers.

After that I would scan the PDF and such and then simply use Dolibarrs API to feed the data into Dolibarr where a human could read and process the invoices.

Either as Supplier Invoice or as an Expense Report. I only know the Expense Report processes, I don’t use Supplier Invoices.

Take a look at the Dolibarr REST API Explorer

6

Thanks,
in fact the purchase order is not always used but it is a formal way of registering the order and is a great feature.
Would the workflow require a plugin or is it native ?

7

pt_PT
That would be really great.

8

This is a great add-in, it helps a lot with automatic classification

9

Thanks that would however require some additional development.
Although i could dive into it it’s no possible as time it’s not abundant.

Do you know if it is easy to get development services for Dolibarr at fair prices in Fiverr p.ex. or other services ?

10

Thank you all for all the replies.

It seems Dolibarr has many supporters and is equipped with good tools I’ll try to explore this a bit and see if I could setup something like this.

12

If I understand correctly what you want is for Dolibarr to detect the pdf that they send you. and from there create a record that you can use in supplier invoices.

You can generate some development using native things but you have to complement a lot since the collector can obtain them and according to their rfc or see how to read the pdf and obtain the data from there, create a record and you can hunt the data that they send you with the annexes

but if it would be a custom development,

13

Thanks,
i’m starting with the basics so my flow would be:
1 - read invoices mailbox
2 - grab email
3 - grab pdf from email
4 - create supplier invoice with the pdf attached

– From here on i can go back to previous replies and p.ex. add a plugin to do the ocr of the invoice,…

Baby steps, if dolibarr can do the steps one to four it’ll be a great start

14

dolibarr can collect the email but I have not seen that it natively reads the pdf