Reviewing and publishing

After Otto processes a document, it lands in your review queue. This guide covers the review interface, editing extracted data, and publishing to your accounting platform.

The review interface

The review screen shows the original document alongside the extracted data. You can view the document and edit any field before publishing.

The review interface. Showing the original document and the automatically extracted data

What you’ll see:

• The original document (zoomable)
• Extracted header fields (supplier, invoice number, dates, currency, amounts)
• The matched contact (with match method and confidence score)
• Line items with description, quantity, amounts, tax rate, and account code
• The publish state that will be used, where your platform supports one
• An edit history to show which fields have been changed and by whom
• An event timeline showing processing history

Editing extracted data

All extracted fields are editable. You can make any changes you need before publishing.

Header fields:

• Supplier name
• Invoice number
• Issue date and due date
• Currency
• Net amount, tax amount, and total amount

Line items:

• Description
• Quantity and unit amount
• Tax rate (from your client’s synced tax rates)
• Account code, or nominal code on FreeAgent (from your client’s synced accounts or categories)
• Tracking categories (Xero only)

Contact:

• Select a different contact from your synced contacts
• Create a new contact if the supplier doesn’t exist yet

Publish state:

• On platforms that support settable states (Xero), override the default state for this document (see Xero publish states)

Tip

If you need to change the default publish state for all future documents, update it in the client configuration instead.

Changes are saved automatically and tracked in the edit history with before/after values. If you come back to the same document within 30 minutes, your changes are merged into the same edit rather than creating a new revision.

Creating contacts during review

If the extracted supplier or customer doesn’t match any existing contact, you can create a new one directly from the review screen. The new contact is saved locally and will be created in your accounting platform when you publish the document.

Publishing

When you’re satisfied with the extracted data, click Publish to send the document to your accounting platform.

Before publishing, Capture validates the data:

Errors (must be fixed before publishing):

• Missing required fields (contact name, invoice number, issue date, currency, total amount)
• No contact selected
• No line items
• Invalid account codes (not in your chart of accounts or categories)
• Invalid tax rates (not applicable to this document type)
• Currency not available in your accounting platform (not enabled on Xero, or not supported by FreeAgent)

Warnings (can be acknowledged and published anyway):

• Missing due date
• Line item amounts don’t match header totals

What gets created

When you publish a document, Capture creates the following in your accounting platform:

1. A bill or invoice: With all the header fields, line items, and tax information
2. A contact: If you created a new contact during review, it’s created first
3. An attachment: The original document file is attached to bills on both platforms. On FreeAgent, sales invoices have no attachment field, so only Xero invoices keep the source file (see Xero and FreeAgent)

On Xero, the bill or invoice is created in the state you selected. FreeAgent has no settable state (see publishing to FreeAgent).

Handling publish errors

If publishing fails, the document is marked as Publish failed and an error message explains what went wrong. Common causes:

• Invalid account code: An account code was removed or deactivated in your accounting platform since the data was synced. Refresh the synced data and update the line item.
• Invalid tax rate: A tax rate is no longer valid. Refresh the synced data and select a different rate.
• Authentication error: The connection to your accounting platform has been lost, usually because access was revoked. Reconnect and retry.
• Rate limited: Too many requests in a short time. Wait a moment and retry.

After fixing the issue, you can retry publishing from the review screen.

Discarding documents

If a document shouldn’t be published (duplicate, irrelevant, or too poor quality), you can discard it. Discarded documents are kept in Capture and can be restored at any time.

On the Needs attention and Ready tabs, you can discard in bulk: select the documents with their checkboxes, click Discard selected, then confirm. This clears a batch of duplicates or test uploads in one go.