Invoice and paperwork automation

From asking to running

Up to this point, you asked the AI and got an answer. A workflow turns that around: you describe the process once, and from then on the platform works through it the same way every time. Read the invoice, check it against your company knowledge, create a file, notify the person responsible. What sets it apart from automation that simply runs through is the review step: a point where a person sees the result and approves it. The AI prepares, a person decides.

Workflows and agents are not active from the start. Datenmassiv AI switches both on, not your own team: a short conversation, no application form. After that, your own administrator still has to give your role the View workflows permission, or the menu item stays hidden. The standard role "Member" does not have it.

What starts a workflow

There are four triggers, and the choice determines everything else:

Manual: someone starts the workflow with a click and fills in the required fields first.
Schedule: the workflow starts on its own, at most once a day. The options are Daily, Weekdays (Mon–Fri), Weekly, Monthly and Custom for a free-form schedule expression.
Form: the workflow starts when someone submits a form.
Transcription finished: the workflow starts after a finished recording or approved minutes; you choose your own or team recordings and the matching meeting types.

For documents from outside, the form is the right fit. As soon as the workflow is active, you get a public link: anyone who has it can submit the form without signing in and without a user account, including a file upload of up to 50 MB. Your field sales rep photographs a receipt, a supplier submits a delivery note, without access to your platform.

What does not exist, we will say right away: no start by webhook and none by incoming email. That affects the most common case: invoices arrive by email. The practical route today is to put the form link where the document originates: into the order confirmation for the supplier, onto the phone for the field team. Then nobody uploads anything after the fact; the document comes in the right way from the start. For invoices that still land in the inbox, the detour through the same link remains.

Capture invoices and receipts

Ready-made templates are waiting under Workflows → Templates. Each detail page shows the actual process and its prerequisites, such as the knowledge base or document template it needs. Choose by the task you have; the catalog can be filtered by area and searched.

Open Workflows in the sidebar and then Templates.
Choose E-invoices & incoming invoices and read "How it works" on the detail page.
Click Use template. You need the Edit workflows permission for this; without it, the button is not available.
For the review, choose Review in the app or Approval link by email to a member of your organization.
Click Create workflow. A preview with sample data then starts. It sends no emails and does not stop at any review step, but AI steps really run.
Check the recipient in the email steps. Triggering member means, when started through the form link, the person who created the workflow; choose another member of the organization if needed.
Click Activate.
Copy the Form link with Copy link.

The workflow itself is short: the form receives the invoice, a building block extracts supplier, number, amounts, date and IBAN, and a condition splits by amount (template default: 5,000 euros, adjustable). Small amounts continue directly, larger ones go to the review step first. At the end comes a formatted email with the original invoice attached, sent to the workflow's creator or another selected member of the organization.

The template as shipped decides solely on the extracted gross amount: above 5,000 euros it waits for approval, up to and including 5,000 euros it continues automatically. The template currently does not trigger an approval because of uncertainty or missing invoice details. The preview skips reviews and therefore does not prove that a real run waits for approval. If every invoice has to be checked before it is passed on, this template in its current form is not the right unsupervised process.

Receipts for the tax advisor handles month end: photograph, extract, assign the booking account, create an Excel overview. Emails from workflows may only go to members of your organization; an external tax advisor cannot be entered directly as a recipient.

Answer customer inquiries after review

For Customer inquiry → reviewed draft reply, you choose the knowledge base with your approved answers and who is responsible for the human review when you set it up. A reply to a customer is more delicate than an invoice line; it has to be right. The template Customer inquiry → reviewed draft reply handles that with the four-eyes principle:

The inquiry comes in through the form.
A building block searches your knowledge base for the relevant passages.
An agent drafts a reply from them, instructed not to invent anything.
A second agent checks this draft against the same knowledge base: is every statement backed up, is the question fully answered, is the tone right? It names specific weak points and gives a recommendation.
A person reads the draft and the pre-check side by side and approves.

Reviewer and author are deliberately two different agents. Even a second AI review does not guarantee a correct answer; the professional decision stays with a person. The setup dialog asks which knowledge base the template uses when you create it.

If the inquiry should turn into a quote, choose Create a quote from a customer inquiry. For that you need a knowledge base with prices and your own DOCX template with the matching placeholders. The template instructs the agent to use prices from it and to flag missing prices; check amounts and the quote's validity yourself. After approval, the DOCX file goes to a member of your organization, who forwards it to the customer.

What you see here is not a diagram from a brochure but the workflow itself. The building blocks are grouped into AI, logic, actions, and output and review; the full list and its restrictions are in the reference. You place them on the canvas and can see at any time what your business automates. Too much tinkering? In the create dialog of the workflows overview, describe your process in a sentence under Or describe your own process, and the AI puts a draft on the canvas. That is a starting point, not a finished process: expect to add building blocks, fill in fields and walk through a run yourself once.

Create recurring reports

The third case needs no form, but a calendar and a knowledge base with the documents to evaluate. Choose it when you create the report template. A workflow with the Schedule trigger starts on its own, for example Project time report every Friday morning or Create quality report every Monday.

The schedule starts the workflow.
A building block searches the chosen knowledge base for the documents intended for the report.
An agent evaluates them and writes the report.
The Create file building block turns it into a file.
An email goes to the person responsible, with the report attached.

Download the result file in the run details under Created files with Download. Output files are available as PDF, Word, Excel, CSV, JSON or text and are kept for 90 days by default. Results can also be written back into a knowledge base, so the chat finds them next time.

The review step: a person approves

This is the building block that makes automation acceptable to mid-sized businesses in the first place. The workflow stops until a person has decided. They see the content fully formatted, along with the Review note you stored, and have three options:

Approve: the workflow continues.
Approve with changes: if exactly one text is up for review, the reviewer switches to the Edit tab, corrects it, and the workflow continues with the corrected version.
Send back for revision: the workflow stops.

The middle option only makes sense if the following building blocks use the corrected content from the review step. In its current version, the invoice template still uses the originally extracted fields after the review. So do not correct invoice data only in the review dialog; stop the run with Send back for revision if the extracted values are wrong.

There is one setting you have to make yourself. Without email approval, no review request goes out; the open review waits in the app. When you copy a template, choose Review in the app or Approval link by email for each review. In workflows you build yourself, turn on Email approval in the review step's settings to send a message, and enter a member of your organization under Reviewer. That person then receives an email with a single-use link and can approve or reject without signing in. For a review in the app, you decide directly on the run page or in the run details; for that you need Run workflows. Without a decision, the run waits until the deadline expires (72 hours by default) and then fails. That is the most common reason for a workflow that seems to hang for no reason.

Where the workflow ends and a person takes over

We draw one line on purpose: emails from a workflow go exclusively to members of your organization. An outside address is not silently ignored; it stops the step with a clear message. The same applies to the person allowed to approve a review step.

That means you cannot build "the quote goes to the customer automatically" with Datenmassiv AI. The reviewed draft reply, the extracted invoice and the finished report land in the inbox of the colleague responsible; the last step outward remains a person. Whatever leaves your company has been seen by a person.

When something goes wrong

While a workflow is in the Draft state, its start button is called Test run. A test run is still a real run with your inputs: it sends emails and uses AI quota; only the automatic preview after creation works with sample data. If a run failed, Continue from the error in the run details carries over the completed results. If an approval cannot be carried over safely, the review and the following steps are required again; the failed step may send emails or use AI quota again. With Stop run you can also end a run that is waiting for review; actions already started may still finish and are not undone. During execution you see every step individually, and every run stays traceable in the run history.

If a run nobody started by hand fails (schedule or form), an email goes automatically to the person who created the workflow. If a Schedule or Transcription finished workflow fails three times in a row, the platform also pauses it by itself. That deliberately does not apply to form workflows: three unusable submissions do not make a broken workflow.

If a workflow needs a key for an external service, store it under Credentials. The key is stored securely, does not appear in the logs and, once created, is never shown in plain text again, not even to you.

Workflows: building blocks, permissions and settings in detail.
Agents: the agents inside the building blocks.
Knowledge bases: the company knowledge behind it.

So far, everything stayed in-house. In the next chapter, the same knowledge goes outside: A website chatbot that answers at night.