The receipt inbox is the central intake and review point for newly uploaded receipts. Receipts are first collected here and can be reviewed before being transferred to the system. A receipt is only added to receipt management after it has been actively accepted by an administrator.

The receipt inbox makes the receipt process more structured, transparent, and controllable.

Find the menu item under Receipts > Receipt Inbox.

Administrators can upload and process incoming receipts in the table. Controllers can view uploaded receipts.

The following functions are available:

The Receipt Number and Status columns are always shown and cannot be hidden.

Click Upload receipts to open a window where you can upload files – including XInvoices. After uploading, the receipt appears as a new entry in the receipt inbox and can be reviewed, edited, accepted, or rejected.

Instead of uploading receipts manually, you can connect an e-mail mailbox to ZEP. Suppliers and employees send receipts to this mailbox, ZEP fetches the attachments automatically and creates them as new entries in the Receipt Inbox. Multiple mailboxes can be set up in parallel and are all treated identically; there is no limit.

You configure mailboxes under Administration > Project times and receipts > Mailboxes. Setup works analogously to the ticket system mailbox.

Three authentication variants are available:

When creating a second Microsoft Graph mailbox, ZEP automatically pre-fills OAuth ID, OAuth secret, and Tenant ID from the most recently created Graph mailbox, so the Azure credentials do not need to be entered each time.

For Standard IMAP, you test the connection directly after saving — no authorization is needed. For OAuth connections (Google or Microsoft) and for Microsoft Graph, the status is initially Not authorized. Click the key icon, run through the provider's login, and then test the connection. The status appears colored next to the mailbox; on a failed connection, a tooltip shows the exact error message.

ZEP regularly checks all unread e-mails in the connected mailbox. Both newly arriving and already existing mails are processed, as long as they have not yet been read. Already-read e-mails are ignored. When you connect an existing mailbox to ZEP, mark all relevant mails as unread beforehand — otherwise they will not be fetched.

If a mail is manually set back to unread in the mailbox after processing, ZEP will fetch it again on the next run. This can create a duplicate entry in the Receipt Inbox — avoid resetting the read status manually.

Only PDF and XML (for example for XRechnungen) are accepted. Image formats (JPG, PNG, and others) are intentionally not accepted so that e-mail signatures or logos are not accidentally read as receipts. Attachments in other formats are ignored. If an e-mail has multiple matching attachments, ZEP creates a separate entry in the Receipt Inbox per attachment.

Each fetched attachment becomes an entry with the following values:

The Receipt Inbox table automatically displays the column Submission type as soon as the first mailbox is set up. You can then filter specifically for mailbox entries in the table.

No automatic assignment based on the sender address takes place — even if the domain matches. Mailbox receipts are processed regularly in the next step: when accepting or rejecting, an employee may be assigned, just as with a manual upload.

ZEP does not delete or move any mails — they remain in your inbox (e.g. Outlook). Depending on the content, the following happens:

As soon as the first mailbox is set up, the automatic fetching runs in the background. ZEP automatically creates the system task Fetch Receipt Inbox Mailbox for this — you do not need to create anything yourself. The task fetches the mailboxes by default every 15 minutes. The frequency can be changed to 5 minutes, 15 minutes, or hourly.

If you want to check immediately whether new mails have arrived, start the same task manually under Administration > System > Tasks. The connection test in the mailbox configuration only verifies the reachability of the mailbox, not the fetch operation itself.

Use the Inactive field to disable a mailbox temporarily. It remains visible in the overview but is no longer polled. This is useful when a mailbox should pause briefly without losing the configuration. To remove the mailbox permanently, delete it from the overview.

Security note: ZEP does not perform its own scan of attachments for malware. Make sure that the upstream spam and malware filter of your e-mail provider is active and that a dedicated mailbox for receipts is used.

Click the green checkmark on the left side of the receipt row to open a detail view with the associated file. This lets you verify that the receipt is valid and complete before accepting it.

All fields except creator and receipt file can be edited in the detail view.

When you save the detail view after reviewing, the receipt receives the status “Accepted” and is transferred to the system as a regular receipt.

After acceptance:

If a receipt is invalid or irrelevant, close the detail view via the X or Cancel, then click the red X in the receipt column. A window opens where you can optionally add a note.

After rejection, a trash icon replaces the previous symbols. Use this icon to permanently delete the receipt from the system.

If assigning a receipt to an employee is not appropriate, receipts can also be created without an employee assignment. This option is available when accepting a receipt in the inbox as well as in receipt reports (Projects, Suppliers, Employees).