How to Set Up Automated Email Invoice Processing in 15 Minutes

Your AP team opens their inbox every morning to the same problem: dozens of vendor invoices scattered across emails. Some are PDF attachments. Some are embedded in the email body. Some are scanned images of paper invoices. Each one needs to be downloaded, opened, read, and manually typed into a spreadsheet or ERP. It doesn’t scale—and it doesn’t have to work this way.

Here’s the play: forward your invoices to Lido and let AI extract every field automatically. Setup takes about 15 minutes. No code, no IT ticket, no vendor onboarding process.

Why email invoice processing breaks down

Invoices arrive in every format imaginable. One vendor sends a clean PDF attachment. Another embeds line items directly in the email body. A third sends a photo of a handwritten invoice. Your AP team has to handle all of them the same way: download, open, read, and retype the data into your system.

That manual process takes 3–5 minutes per invoice on a good day. At 500 invoices per month, that’s 25–40 hours of pure data entry—an entire work week spent copying numbers from one screen to another. At 2,000 invoices per month, you need dedicated headcount just for data entry.

The real cost isn’t just time. Manual entry introduces errors. Fields get transposed. Invoices get missed. Duplicates slip through. And every mistake compounds downstream in reconciliation, payment timing, and vendor relationships.

How to set up automated email invoice processing in Lido

Automated invoice processing sounds like a big infrastructure project. It isn’t. Here’s the setup in four steps.

1. Step 1: Create an extractor in Lido. Define the fields you need—vendor name, invoice number, line items, totals, due dates, PO number, tax amounts. Describe what you want in plain English. No code. No rigid templates. Lido’s AI adapts to whatever invoice format it receives.
2. Step 2: Get your unique forwarding email address. Every Lido extractor gets a dedicated email address. This is the destination for your invoices. Copy it—you’ll use it in the next step.
3. Step 3: Set up auto-forwarding in Gmail or Outlook. Create a forwarding rule that routes vendor invoices to your Lido email automatically. Filter by sender, subject line, or attachment type—whatever matches your invoice flow. Lido processes both attachments and email body text, so it doesn’t matter how vendors send their invoices.
4. Step 4: Review and export. Extracted data appears in your Lido spreadsheet within roughly 30 seconds per invoice. Each field is structured and ready to use. Review the results, then export to CSV, Excel, Google Sheets, or JSON for direct ERP import.

The entire setup takes about 15 minutes. No IT involvement required. No multi-week implementation. You can go from inbox chaos to structured data before your next coffee gets cold.

What automated email invoice processing looks like in practice

Soldier Field went from 20 hours per week of manual invoice entry to 30-second processing per invoice. Their AP team was fully operational on Lido within 15 minutes of starting setup.

Esprigas auto-forwards invoices from their inbox and processes 27,000 documents monthly without manual intervention. Their team reviews flagged exceptions instead of typing every field by hand.

TOK Commercial freed 85% of their AP team’s capacity. Lido’s invoice OCR extracts the data, and their AI auto-codes GL entries—turning a multi-step manual process into a single review-and-approve workflow.

The pattern is the same in every case: forward invoices, extract data, export to your system. The difference is measured in hours reclaimed per week and errors eliminated per month.