How to send an invoice with PDF-2-FLOW

Before You Begin:

Some of your customers may require you to register your company (AKA, onboard) prior to sending invoices to them. This is something that your customer would have communicated to you in advance, so before sending an invoice with PDF-2-FLOW, make sure you have completed this step (if applicable).

For example, both the Municipality of Amsterdam and Rabobank require their suppliers to register their company and create an account in our FLOW platform before they will begin accepting invoices. Read more on that here.

1. The first invoice that you send with PDF-2-FLOW should be a real invoice that you want to send to your customer. It is not necessary to send a test invoice first, because you will receive feedback from us via email in the case that your invoice is missing any mandatory fields as outlined in our minimum requirements. Your invoice will not be sent to your customer until these requirements have been met.

Remember: You are responsible for ensuring that your invoice contains any additional fields as required by your customer, which may or may not be included in the minimum requirements listed above. Read more about meeting your customers' unique invoice requirements here. 

Here are some additional articles that may be helpful to you: 

• You can download an example of an invoice that would be accepted by us here.
• You can read through some best practices for sending your invoices here.

2. Once you have decided on the invoice that you would like to send and feel confident that it will be accepted by us and by your customer as outlined above, it's important to give your invoice a unique file name. We recommend naming your invoices as such: [invoice_number].pdf

If you must also include one or more attachments, read this article.

3. Go back to the Invoice Upload tab in the PDF-2-FLOW portal.

2. You have two options when it comes to sending your invoice with PDF-2-FLOW:

• Option 1: Drag and drop your invoice into the widget (outlined in blue above)
• Option 2: Upload your invoice into the widget by clicking Browse 

Option 1: Drag and Drop

If you choose to drag and drop to send your invoice, open up your File Explorer.

Locate the folder in which your invoice is located. For demonstration purposes, we've saved our example invoice to the Downloads folder as shown below. 

Drag and drop your invoice as shown.

Click Upload. If you run into the situation in which your invoice opens in a new tab, simply close the tab and try the above steps again. It is possible to upload invoices in bulk.

Option 2: Browse

If you click Browse, your File Explorer will pop up automatically and you can locate your invoice in the folder you saved it to. For demonstration purposes, we've saved our example invoice to the Downloads folder as shown below.

Once you locate the file, select it by clicking on it, then click Open.

Click Upload.

4. If your upload was successful, it will appear in the Uploaded Invoices overview below:

IMPORTANT: "Success" indicates that the invoice has been accepted by TIE Kinetix. Please note that this is different than the success indicator “Ok” in the PDF-2-FLOW Analytics report which means that the invoice has successfully reached the intended recipient, who will then choose whether or not to accept it based on the content of the invoice).

5. Within 24-48 hours, you can log back in to the PDF-2-FLOW portal and navigate to the PDF-2-FLOW Analytics tab to check the status. 

If in the meantime you receive an email from us that your invoice could not be delivered to the intended recipient, please follow the instructions contained in the email to correct your invoice and resend it (including any attachments). Once you have done this, it will again take 24-48 hours for the invoice to appear in your PDF-2-FLOW Analytics report. 

Alternatively, you may run into the situation that your invoice has been accepted by us but not by your customer. In this case, the status of your invoice will be Ok in the report, but you likely received an email from your customer (or their service provider) that your invoice could not be accepted. Please double check that your invoice contains all additional fields required by your customer and resend the invoice (including any attachments). 

If you run into any issues during this process, please contact us for assistance.