When you forward documents to your ApprovalMax Capture email address, the system automatically validates and processes each attachment to create new Bill/Purchase Order/Sales Invoice/AP Credit Note requests.
What happens if an email has no attachments?
If an email is sent to the ApprovalMax Capture inbox without any files attached, ApprovalMax cannot create a request.
The sender receives a failure notification stating:
What happens if an email contains multiple attachments?
When an email includes multiple attachments (e.g. an invoice, terms and conditions, and a supplier form), each attachment is treated independently.
ApprovalMax creates a separate draft/request for every valid file attached, regardless of whether it’s an invoice or not.
For non-invoice documents (such as supplier forms or Terms and Conditions), a request is still created, but ApprovalMax Capture won’t extract any data — the request will appear with empty fields:
If you need more control over how your email attachments are processed, you can use email tags; however, combining multiple attachments into a single request via email is not currently supported.
File validation rules
Before creating a request, ApprovalMax checks:
Allowed file types
For Xero-connected Organisations, the following formats are accepted:
.JPG, .JPEG, .GIF, .PNG, .BMP, .TIF, .TIFF, .PDF, .DOC, .DOCX, .XLS, .XLSX, .PPT, .PPTX, .ODF, .CSV, .TXT, .TEXT, .RTF, .EML, .MSG, .ODS, .ODT, .KEYNOTE, .KEY, .PAGES, .NUMBERS, .ZIP, .RAR, .7Z
File size limit: 10 MB per file
If the attachment passes validation: a separate request is created.
If the attachment fails validation: no request is created.
How ApprovalMax Capture handles recognition
After validation, ApprovalMax Capture sends the file for OCR recognition.
Files sent for recognition are:
PDFs
Image formats (.JPG, .PNG, .BMP, .TIF, etc.)
If a file is not recognised (because it is not a PDF or image):
If the file is valid, a request is still created but because recognition is skipped, it remains in Drafts and is only visible to the email submitter.