Process Your First Invoice
Seven short steps from install to a registered Business Central purchase invoice. Realistically a coffee break’s worth of time once you have access.
This walkthrough assumes nothing beyond a Business Central environment and an administrator who can grant access. Read it once end to end before your first real invoice, then keep it open as a checklist the first few times.
Before you start: give yourself something to reconcile against
DocumentQ checks an invoice against a purchase order and a posted receipt. For a first run that actually exercises the product, have all three:
- A purchase order for a vendor, for a known quantity at a known price.
- A posted goods receipt against it.
- The vendor’s invoice for it, as a PDF.
If you skip the receipt, the document will correctly land at an exception saying there is nothing to check against — which is a valid result, just not the one that shows you what DocumentQ does.
1. Install and take a seat
Your Business Central administrator installs DocumentQ in your environment. Then assign yourself DocumentQ - Full (Write/Post) under Users → your user → Permission Sets.
On a brand-new tenant nobody holds that seat yet. A user with SUPER can complete setup and then assign the seats. See permissions and roles.
2. Run setup
Search for DocumentQ Setup and open it. Opening the page creates the setup record with its defaults.
Then, on that page:
- Activate Tenant — one action, nothing to type.
- Check Storage Mode. The default is BDP Managed Azure Storage. Read where your documents are stored before leaving it — it is the one setup choice worth thinking about.
- Leave the Policy Defaults switches off for now. They ship off deliberately.
Finally, switch to the role: Settings (gear) → My Settings → Role → Accounts Payable — DocumentQ.
The full detail is in setting up DocumentQ.
3. Get the invoice in
On the role centre or on AP Documents, choose Upload Invoice and pick the PDF.
Read the message you get back. Either the document was accepted and queued, or it was recognised as a duplicate of something already in the system. A superseded document is excluded from the tiles, so skipping this message is how a correct duplicate detection comes to look like a lost file.
The document now sits at status Received.
4. Click Capture
Open the document — page caption AP Document — and click Capture. It is also available directly from the list.
This single click runs the whole pipeline: the identity pass, vendor identification, the duplicate checks, the full extraction pass, reconciliation, and the decision. It can legitimately take a few minutes; two round trips to the AI service happen inside it.
5. Read where it landed
Three fields on the card header tell you everything: Status, Latest Decision Action, and Latest Error Code.
Ready — every check passed. Go to step 6.
Exception — a specific check failed. Read the reason code and the decision factors underneath it: what each check expected, what it found, and by how much. Then take one of the routes in resolving an exception. On a first run the most common honest results are a vendor that could not be identified (add the tax registration number to the vendor card, or bind it by hand once) and a quantity failure (the receipt was not posted, or was posted for a different quantity).
Capture Failed — the call failed. This is not a finding about your invoice. Check the PDF opens and is not password-protected, then click Capture again.
6. Look at the reconciliation before you register
Even on a clean Ready document, look at it once. Open the Workspace — role centre → Documents → Workspace (Triage) — and read the grid: the vendor’s claimed quantity and price on one side, what your purchase order and posted receipt say on the other, and the verdict on the row.
This is the thing worth seeing on a first run. It is also where you will spend your time on every exception afterwards.
7. Register, then post
Click Register, on the card, the list or the Workspace. Business Central builds the purchase invoice from your posted receipt and your purchase order using its own Get Receipt Lines. The document moves to Registered and a real, unposted Business Central purchase invoice now exists.
Open it and check it reads what you expect. Then Post it as you normally would.
Posting is always yours. DocumentQ has no setting that posts on its own, and where you have configured approval routing, it will actively block posting until the document is approved.
Done
You have uploaded, captured, reconciled, registered and posted a real invoice.
Everything from here is the same loop at scale. Two next stops worth knowing: the reason code reference, for the day something fails a check, and unattended processing, for when you want the loop to run on a schedule instead of a click.
A worked example worth trying deliberately
Once the ordinary path works, try the case the whole design exists for.
Raise a purchase order for 5 units at 100.00. Post a receipt for all five. Then feed DocumentQ an invoice claiming 8 units at 120.00.
What should happen: the claim’s own arithmetic is consistent (8 × 120 = 960), so nothing catches it there. The vendor identifies. The order is found. Then the quantity check compares the claimed 8 against the uninvoiced received quantity of 5, fails, and writes a factor row reading expected 5, actual 8, delta +3, ERR-QTY-OVER. The document goes to Exception and no Business Central document exists.
If you then override it and click Register anyway, Business Central builds 5 at 100.00 — the quantity from the receipt, the price from the order — and DocumentQ then refuses the build outright, because the total it just constructed (500.00) does not match the total the vendor claimed (960.00). The partial document is rolled back.
Neither 8 nor 120 can reach the ledger by any path. Watching that happen once is worth more than reading about it.