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solarguy35's avatar
solarguy35
Qrew Member
27 days ago

Seeking suggestions for accounts payable workflow

Hello all,

I'm working on an improvement to our accounts payable process. At present we use smartsheets and have vendors submit invoices via a form. After that the process falls apart quickly and I want to fix that using QB.

My questions are about that initial vendor input. I know I can create a form and set permissions for EOTI, I've done that in the past to create a visitor access log and it worked well. In this case we want them to attach a PDF file.

Is there a reliable way to restrict the file type to ensure we only have PDF documents uploaded? 

In the past I never had issues with spammers finding and using the previous form I had set to EOTI. Now that I'm dealing with attachments how concerned should I be of the wrong person finding the link and spamming us with hazardous attachments. I was thinking of having an intermediate app that collects invoice data and attachments to isolate it from our core app. Then using automation to validate the vendors as known and unknown. If the vendor is known automation  then creates a new record on our main app to start the approval workflow. If the vendor is unknown they need to be approved by a human to move forward. Am I over thinking this process or is there a better way?

I haven't researched it yet, but a former employer used an intermediate app that OCR scanned all documents into PDF docs to isolate the external attachment and potential virus from their accounting system. Their system was overly complicated and I'm hoping to avoid that. 

Does anyone have any different suggestions for that initial data entry form? Should I look at using a different form input like Google Forms that trigger a zapier that inputs the data into QB?

Thanks in advance for any help!

  • When I'm dealing with EOTI apps,  I isolate the EOTI users into a different app.  The main reason I do that is just avoid the possibility of an accidental mistake on  permissions and somehow the EOTI users get visibility into the main app and its data.   You can still choose to have the apps connected with cross app relationships though. 

    I do not believe you can have a form rule (Legacy or New Style forms) which will detect the suffix of a file before the record is saved. 

    You could make a checkbox to detect if the file name has a suffix of .pdf and then have a Pipeline delete the file attachment.  If you go that route I can give you the syntax to delete a file attachment  

    The formula would look something like this as a hook for the pipeline to trigger.

     

    Ends(ToText([File Attachment field]), ".pdf")