AI for finance and accounts inboxes
Invoices stall when they sit in an inbox with no owner; suppliers chase because nobody chased first. Your assistant runs the ledger-like board — capture, due dates, polite chasers — while approvals stay human.
What you'll end up with
- Every invoice a card with number, vendor, amount and due date in fields — the deadline view becomes your payment run.
- Payment chasers drafted (never sent) the day something falls due.
- Disputes and mismatches escalated with a note, not discovered at month-end.
Before you start
- Sortd set up in Gmail — a Finance board with stage lists (Received, Approved, Scheduled, Paid, Overdue) and custom fields for invoice number, vendor, amount and due date.
- Your assistant connected — two minutes, one browser approval: Connect your AI. Everything below works in Claude, ChatGPT, or any connected assistant.
- The right permissions — when you connect you tick what the assistant may do — send permissions start unticked. For this guide: reading email, reading and updating the board, and preparing drafts (drafts never send by themselves).
Set it up by talking to your assistant
Each step is something you type (or say) to your assistant — copy them as they are, or change the names to match your own boards and lists. You don't need to know what happens behind the scenes, but we explain it anyway.
1. Capture invoices into fields
The keying-in, done for you.
Check for new invoice emails. Make each a card on Finance / Received and fill the fields: invoice number, vendor, amount, due date — read them from the email.What happens: The board's table view becomes an invoice register; the deadline view shows what falls due when.
2. Follow the approvals
Cards should move when the thread says so.
Where a thread shows an approval reply from a manager, move the card to Approved. Anything past its due date and not Paid, move to Overdue and put it at the top.What happens: Stage changes follow the actual email evidence, and overdue items stop hiding.
3. Draft the chasers
Polite, specific, on time — and a human presses send.
For each card in Overdue, draft a courteous payment reminder that references the invoice number and amount, in our usual tone. Don't send — leave them for review.What happens: Chasers appear as drafts on the right threads with the details filled in from the card's fields.
4. Escalate the messy ones
Judgement stays with people; detection doesn't have to.
Flag any thread where the amounts in the conversation don't match the invoice field, or where the vendor disputes something — add a note explaining the mismatch and assign those to Dana.What happens: Discrepancies get found, explained, and routed while they're one email old.
Put it on autopilot
Once a run works when you ask for it, schedule it — a daily run keeps capture, stages and chasers on time.
Every weekday at 8, capture new invoices onto Finance / Received with fields filled, advance approved ones, move overdue items up, and draft reminders for anything newly overdue.Claude (Cowork scheduled tasks) and ChatGPT (scheduled tasks) can both do this — cadences, tips and more recipes are on AI Schedule.
You stay in control
- Drafts by default. Unless you granted a send permission, the assistant can only prepare replies — they wait in Gmail for a human to send.
- Everything is visible. Every card the assistant creates or moves shows up on the board instantly, exactly as if a teammate did it — same statuses, same history, same audit trail.
- Easy to undo, easy to unplug. Moves and statuses can be changed back on the board, and you can disconnect the assistant at any time from the same place you connected it.
More: AI for operations inboxes · every action the assistant can take, with example prompts: AI Reference · all use cases: AI guides