Hi team,
Apologies if this is already covered but I’ve had a good look through the API docs and can’t find anything relevant. Firstly, smart capture is awesome because it so nearly addresses the worst bit of FreeAgent/small business admin (to me) - invoice/bank explanations.
As I would imagine do many of your users, I have a lot of invoices that come in from suppliers as PDFs etc. I’ve already got some personal automation to move these invoice PDFs into one place, but right now I still have to manually go through the Banking explain → click → find the matching PDF → attach → upload → “Invoice” → enter which gets old pretty fast when you’re doing 50-100 items a month. Yes there are definitely some UI improvements FA could make, but ideally we could just automate it away and with smart capture that dream is so close!
I understand that you used to have but removed the ability to add invoices by email. In an ideal world, now that you have smart capture, it would be amazing if you could bring the email capture back! Pre-smart capture, I can see why the feature wouldn’t really have made much sense for most people, it doesn’t save much time if you still have to manually associated invoices with a transaction. Please do revisit that decision now that smart capture has been released!
It would allow non-technical users to just set up an email rule to forward from “supplier-invoices@whatever.com” straight into FreeAgent. That would immediately cut my banking reconciliation faffery to almost nothing compared to what it is now.
Unfortunately, I suspect that isn’t going to happen so I’m looking to emulate it by being able to upload a file to the smart capture endpoint via API. That way, at least technical users such as myself can knock up a quick script to bulk upload from “Invoices/*.pdf” straight into smart capture.
The best bit is, adding back email or at least API access to smart capture might pay for itself!
Right now, smart capture for me is limited in usefulness to the odd expense receipt I snap a photo of on the go, so the unlimited add-on isn’t worth it - if I have to do the download → upload thing, I may as well do it on the explanation directly. If I could just email in my invoice emails and have them automatically attached to the explanations, so I can just go through doing “Widget Foo” explain “Widget Bar” explain that’s worth way more than £5 a month in my time.
There’s been a couple of threads on similar topics where the responses are “use the mobile app” - I would just ask that you imagine sitting down, scrolling through emails on your phone looking for 50 supplier emails, downloading the PDFs individually then adding them one at a time via the FreeAgent app. The mobile app is fine for the odd expense or whatever but not really suitable for bulk reconciliation. Also, because the weak point of all phone UIs is dealing with upload/downloading files, having this functionality would make doing reconciliation much easier via the mobile app.
Many thanks in hope!