The Bottleneck: One mailbox doing too many jobs, and it’s usually the wrong mailbox
Finance admin takes up time that could be better spent elsewhere, and most of that time is avoidable with a few simple changes.
The common version
Every supplier invoice lands in the founder’s, CEO’s or MD’s inbox. It gets buried under everything else, sits unactioned, and eventually turns into a late payment. Nobody is being careless. Managing supplier invoices by hand just isn’t a good use of the most senior person’s time.
This is a bottleneck in the plainest sense. The task is necessary, but it’s routed through the person whose attention is the scarcest resource in the company. Every invoice waits in their queue, behind decisions that actually need their judgement. In lean terms it’s waste: the work is fine, but who does it and where it waits is not.
The other common version
Most accounting systems give you a dedicated inbox for invoices. Xero, for example, gives each organisation its own long, awkward email address, and anything sent there arrives as a draft bill. It works, but it has costs:
You lose sight of supplier correspondence, because only the attachments make it through.
You can’t reject anything at the door.
Anything that doesn’t belong, like statements, marketing emails or duplicates, sits as a draft until someone deletes it by hand.
The fix: a pooling mailbox with a forwarding rule underneath
Create one mailbox with one job: AP. Call it accounts@, payables@ or purchasing@, whatever fits. In Microsoft 365 a shared mailbox usually needs no extra licence. In Google Workspace a group or collaborative inbox does the same job.
Give the address to suppliers, and update it on your POs and supplier forms. This takes invoices out of the founder’s inbox entirely.
Lock down access to the people who actually process bills, so the mailbox stays clean.
Add an auto-forward rule that sends invoices on to your accounting system’s inbox. Start broad, for example anything with a PDF attachment, and refine over time with sender filters and exceptions. If you’re on Microsoft 365 and nothing arrives, check whether external forwarding is blocked, because it is by default.
This gives you the best of both setups:
Supplier correspondence stays visible in one place.
The automation into your accounting system still works.
The rule can grow with your supplier base, without anyone touching the founder’s inbox.
The outcome
Once invoices land as drafts, you choose the control that fits your size. That could be submit-for-approval, edit before approving, or straight from draft to approved. Most of the manual handling disappears, and a human still reviews before anything is paid.
More importantly, the loop no longer runs through the one person whose time is worth the most and who has the least of it to give.
The same pattern works for accounts receivable, and for any process where email arrives from outside and needs routing to the right place.
See my recent post on standard work in Xero: defaults and saved reports that save time and improve quality - link below.