How to manage your business invoices with Email for Trello
Transform your finance processes in Trello! Manage your bills with Email for Trello, right from receipt to payment and filing. Quickly process invoices and get an overview of your bills in one central dashboard.
Invoice management in Trello
Every business needs a workflow related to bill management and payments. From creating purchase orders, to loading and approving payments and completing accounting tasks, there are a lot of moving parts to keep track of along the way! An efficient invoice management system is all about streamlining bill collection, validation and payment.
Trello is a great tool for managing this process as its handy Kanban-style layout helps you and your team monitor the progress of bills as they move through your workflow in real-time. But with the Email for Trello Power-Up, we can take it one step further by having bills sent directly to Trello as emails. Let’s take a closer look.
How can Email for Trello help?
Let me guess, your accounting inbox gets forwarded to one admin person, making it impossible to keep track of where invoices stand? Or, even worse, you don’t have a shared address for bills and invoices?
This is where SendBoard’s Email for Trello Power-Up can be a game-changer for finance management. When you connect your shared accounts address (e.g. accounts@example.com), all your incoming bills and invoices will arrive in Trello as new cards. This makes it super easy to keep track of bills as they move from left to right through your workflow – from receipt, to payment, and filing into your accounting system.
This allows you to effectively:
Visualize your business finances at a glance
Engage with both suppliers and employees via email without ever leaving Trello
Keep everything about a particular bill or invoice on one Trello card
Standardize the tasks and processes in your accounting workflow
Use automation and templates to save time and avoid errors
TOP TIP Go into all your SaaS finance platforms and get them to forward invoices to your Trello board. Learn more about your board email address and how to change it in our help center.
Let’s pay some invoices
All you need is a Trello board and the Email for Trello Power-Up to build your own bill management dashboard in Trello. Here are our top tips and templates to get you started!
Set up your workflow
For now, we’ll focus on invoices and bills received as an example. Your workflow needs to accurately reflect your finance workflow, bearing in mind that not all bills arriving in your inbox will be at the same stage of your process. Some might need approval or payment, or some may simply be waiting to be filed.
Here’s what a basic bill management workflow might look like:
Inbox: Incoming emails to your accounts address land in your ‘Inbox’ lane as new Trello cards.
Approval: If you have to approve invoices before moving them along, here’s where you can consult with the relevant team members to verify or reject them.
Payment: The invoices you’ve approved wait in this list to be processed for payment.
Accounting: Invoices are then created and loaded into your accounting software – whether that’s Xero, QuickBooks, FreshBooks or something else.
Filing: If you have a legal obligation to keep your documents for a certain length of time, make sure you save everything in a central location for safekeeping. For example, a shared Google Drive or your company intranet.
Done: All sorted! Your invoices are captured, paid and neatly archived. Time to start all over again next month!
TOP TIP Set up an automation rule to automatically archive cards that have been in the 'Done' list for more than 5 days. See our beginner's guide to Trello automation for more.
Bill management workflow for fictional pet salon, Pet Cuts
Keep important documents on hand
Incoming emails will usually contain important documents like invoices, expense claim forms or copies of receipts that your team will want to file and refer to at different stages of your accounting workflow.
Email for Trello automatically stores PDF and image attachments right on the card, so that everything is available to all team members in a convenient place.
Here’s a closer look at some Trello and Email for Trello features and how to use them to your best advantage when building your eCommerce workflow.
Email attachments are also automatically added as Trello card attachments so that they’re super easy to access
Template responses
Save your team time and offer quick responses by using Saved Reply templates. There are plenty of use cases, but here’s a quick example that you can copy and re-use.
Confirmation of receipt
Once you’ve received an invoice, perhaps you want to confirm receipt with your supplier. Instead of typing out the same email every time, save time and keep communications standardized with a Saved Reply.
Dear {%contactFirstname%},
Thanks, we’ve received your invoice! We process all invoices at the end of the month with payroll. For more information, please refer to our standard payment terms here.
If you need to follow up with this invoice, your reference number is {%referenceNumber%}.
Kind regards,
{%userFirstname%}
The phrases highlighted in bold are variables, which are only available on certain SendBoard plans. Check out our help center for more information on how to use variables in your emails.
Save your template responses with an intuitive keyword like #received. You can simply write a comment on the Trello card containing “@reply ##received” and your supplier will get your templated email, automatically populated with the relevant details.
Save time with automations
Use automations to help you save time and stay organized.
Drag a card to send an email
Combine your Saved Replies with Trello rules for a super-powerful automation that can send emails on your behalf! For example, perhaps you want to automatically send an email to your supplier once their invoice is awaiting payment. Here’s what your rule would look like:
When a card is added to the list ‘Payment’, post comment ‘@reply ##awaitingpayment’
For more details on how to set up this rule, check out our article about how to drag a card to send an email.
Add a checklist
Dealing with bills is often mostly about processing and capturing, so there aren’t always many back and forth emails to send. However, make the most of Trello to help you keep on top of your finance tasks! For example, you can save a pre-populated accounting checklist and automatically add it to a card when it reaches the ‘Accounting’ stage of your workflow.
When a card is added to the list ‘Refund’, Trello will automatically post the comment ‘@reply ##returnaccepted’ to send a Saved Reply.
Color-coordinate with labels
If you want to manage a few processes on the same board, labels are a great way to visually differentiate between cards. For example, you could flag expense claims with a purple label and mark invoices with a blue one. Your team will easily be able to pick out which is which from your dashboard overview.
When a card is added to the list ‘Accounting’, add the ‘Accounting’ checklist to the card
A powerful and flexible finance solution
By bringing your finance emails into Trello, Email for Trello makes it easy and effective to manage your bills, all from one single dashboard. No more confusion about what’s paid and what isn’t! Your whole finance team has access to the same information so that they can track invoices as they move through your workflow in real-time.
These are just a few ideas to get you started with the Email for Trello Power-Up. Get creative and customize as much as you need to suit your own business needs!
