A month of supplier invoices comes off the scanner as image-only PDFs, and by the time you finish uploading them the approval board already shows vendor, invoice number, date, due date, and total on every card. No keying, no second pass, no shoebox.
The app embedded on this page is the Application Tracker Board, a real Taskade Genesis build you can drag cards through right now. It moves records across lanes rather than reading invoices, so use it as the starting point: click "Use this app" to clone it in about ten seconds, relabel the lanes Received, Coded, Approved, and Paid, then wire the upload form and the reading step onto the front of it.
What you get concretely is an accounts payable path with four honest stages. An Invoices Project holds one row per bill. A published form takes the file plus an optional cost-center pick. The Convert File to Text step reads the page, which is the piece that makes scanned bills workable at all: an image-only PDF off the office scanner reads exactly like a typed PDF emailed by the vendor. An Ask Agent step returns vendor name, invoice number, invoice date, due date, currency, subtotal, tax, and total as named fields, plus a line-item list when the bill has one. A card lands in the Received lane with the PDF attached. Anything missing a total or a due date is flagged rather than approved, so the exceptions surface as work rather than hiding in a column.
Work the payables queue in whichever layout suits the moment:
- Board view to move bills through Received, Coded, Approved, and Paid
- Table view for the full ledger with vendor, total, and due date columns
- Calendar view to see every due date before it becomes a late fee
- Plus List, Mind Map, Gantt, and Org Chart across the 7 project views
Automations do the chasing. Connect Taskade automations and a bill above your approval threshold routes to the right approver in Slack, a bill due in three days pings the person holding it, and an approved bill writes a row into your accounting sheet. Across 100+ bidirectional integrations, Gmail pulls invoices arriving as email attachments in while Slack and Google Sheets push status out. The AI agents in the app carry 34 built-in tools with persistent memory, so the agent learns how you code a recurring vendor and proposes the same coding next month.
Two setup decisions decide whether this sticks. The first is your coding list: give the extraction step the accounts and cost centres you actually use, in your own words, and it codes to them rather than to a generic chart. The second is the approval threshold, which belongs in a field rather than buried in a prompt, so raising it from one thousand to five thousand is an edit a finance lead makes in ten seconds. Load three real invoices from three different suppliers before you switch the team over, one clean PDF, one office scan, and one phone photo, and check each in the automation History tab. That short test tells you more about your supplier mix than a week of planning.
Clone the app, invite finance and the approvers, and the ledger, the files, and the coding rules stay yours. No per-seat math to do first.
Go deeper with Automate Invoices and Receipts, the field-by-field build in Build a Document Intake App, and the format list in Read Scanned Paperwork and Photos. Shape the ledger columns with Databases in Projects, browse finished builds in the Community Gallery, or start from a base in the templates library. Pair this with Match Purchase Orders to the Invoices That Arrive and Collect W-9 and Vendor Tax Forms Without Chasing for a complete vendor desk.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can it read invoices that are scans rather than digital PDFs?
Yes, and this is the point of the build. The Convert File to Text step reads words off an image-only PDF, a PNG, a JPG, a WebP, or a HEIC file with nothing to switch on. A digital PDF with selectable text is read straight through. One step, both shapes of paper.
How does it handle line items rather than just totals?
Ask for them by name in the extraction step. Request vendor, invoice number, and then a list of line items with description, quantity, and amount. The agent returns each as its own field, and the line items can populate a connected Project so a bill and its lines stay linked records rather than one long text blob.
What if a vendor changes its invoice layout?
Nothing breaks. The extraction works from the meaning of the page rather than fixed coordinates, so a redesigned template still yields a vendor and a total. When a field genuinely is not on the page the row is flagged as incomplete instead of guessing.
Does it stop duplicate invoices being paid twice?
Add one line to the prompt: before writing the row, check whether the same vendor and invoice number already exist and mark the new submission as a suspected duplicate. The check runs on the parsed fields, so it catches a re-scan of the same bill even when the file name is different.
Can invoices arrive by email instead of a form?
Yes. A form and a webhook are the two paths that carry a real stored file into an automation, and Gmail is one of the 100+ integrations that can hand a message attachment across. See Automation Triggers for starting a run the moment paperwork lands.
Where do the original files live?
Every upload is stored with its submission, attaches to the invoice card, and appears in your workspace Media tab. Auditors get the source document one click from the ledger row.
Is there a file size limit I should tell suppliers about?
For scans and photos, keep them under 20 MB. That is the ceiling for reading words off an image. Typed PDFs, Word files, and spreadsheets are read as text and are bounded by your plan upload size instead. A scanned invoice almost never approaches either.
Can I keep a paper trail of who approved what?
Yes. Approval is a status change on the card, so the record carries who moved it and when. Pair that with the attached invoice and you have the two things an audit asks for: the source document and the decision made against it.
