How to Email Bills to Xero, and Send Them to the Right Company
Xero's own bill forwarding address, Smart Document Capture, and how to handle supplier emails when you run more than one Xero organisation.
Most supplier bills arrive by email as PDFs. Instead of downloading and retyping them, you can forward them straight to Xero. Here's how Xero's own options work, where they fall short, and what to do when you run several companies.
Option 1: Xero's bills forwarding address
Each Xero organisation has its own email address for bills. In Xero, go to Purchases → Bills, start a new bill and look for the option to copy your forwarding email address. Forward supplier emails there with the bill attached, and Xero creates draft bills for you to check.
- Send bills as attachments (PDF or image). Bills written in the email body don't work.
- There's a limit on attachments per email (Xero's help says up to 10), so don't bundle a whole month's bills in one message.
- Every organisation has a different address, so you must forward each bill to the right company's address.
Option 2: Smart Document Capture (Documents inbox)
Xero's Smart Document Capture reads bills and receipts and extracts their details for you to review. You can upload documents, photograph them in the Xero app, or email them to your organisation's Documents address. Xero renamed Files to Documents in 2026, so look there for the address.
Watch out for duplicates. If you use Xero's bills address, Smart Document Capture, Hubdoc and another capture tool at the same time, the same bill can arrive twice. Pick one route per supplier.
Where email-to-Xero gets hard
- Someone still has to forward each email. Xero doesn't watch your inbox.
- Several companies means several addresses, and staff have to know which company each bill belongs to.
- Emails rarely hold one tidy bill. A supplier may attach several invoices, or one PDF may contain a month of bills, and someone has to split them.
Option 3: One email address for every company, with WazzOCR
WazzOCR gives you one bills mailbox (and one WhatsApp number) for all your Xero organisations. Suppliers, staff and clients send everything to one place, and WazzOCR works out which company each bill is for.
- PDF, JPG and PNG attachments are read; small logo and signature images are ignored.
- Several attachments per email, and several bills per PDF, are handled one by one.
- The same attachment is never processed twice, and bills already in Xero (same invoice number) are flagged rather than duplicated.
- If WazzOCR needs to ask which company an emailed bill is for, the question comes to your nominated WhatsApp number, and the Email tab of the dashboard shows anything that needs action.
How WazzOCR handles a bill
- A bill arrives on your WazzOCR WhatsApp number or bills mailbox, as a phone photo or a PDF. One email can carry several attachments, and one PDF can hold several bills: WazzOCR splits them and handles each bill separately.
- AI reads it: supplier, invoice number, bill and due dates, currency, each line item, discounts, SST or other tax, and the total. It copes with angled photos, handwritten receipts and Malaysian formats such as DD/MM dates and per-line SST codes.
- It works out which company the bill is for. WazzOCR reads the “Bill To” name and matches it against the Xero organisations you've connected, allowing for Sdn Bhd and Bhd suffixes, branch names and abbreviations. If it isn't sure, it asks on WhatsApp with a numbered list of your companies. Anything still unresolved waits in the Unmatched tab of your WazzOCR dashboard.
- It checks for duplicates. If that company's Xero already has an active bill with the same invoice number, WazzOCR tells you instead of creating a second one.
- It creates a draft bill in that company's Xero: the supplier is matched to an existing Xero contact (or added), each line is coded to an expense account from that company's own Xero chart of accounts, tax is matched to that company's Xero tax rates, foreign-currency bills keep their currency, and the original file is attached to the bill.
- You review and approve in Xero. WazzOCR replies on WhatsApp with a summary and a link to the draft. It never approves or posts anything: your team does that in Xero.
Which option should you use?
| Situation | Best option |
|---|---|
| One company, a few emailed bills a month | Xero's bills forwarding address |
| One company, mix of receipts and bills | Smart Document Capture |
| Several companies, or bills arriving by WhatsApp too | WazzOCR |
| Accounting firm collecting bills from many clients | WazzOCR (one mailbox and WhatsApp number for all client organisations) |
Frequently asked questions
Where do I find my Xero bills email address?
In Purchases → Bills, when creating a new bill, use the option to copy your forwarding email address. Each organisation has its own.
Can Xero read bills in the email body?
No. The bill needs to be an attachment, such as a PDF or image.
Can I use one email address for several Xero companies?
Not with Xero's own addresses, which are per organisation. WazzOCR provides one mailbox for all your organisations and routes each bill to the right company by who it's addressed to.
Xero menu names and limits can change; check Xero Central for current instructions. WazzOCR is a FusionETA product.
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