Shared Inbox Triage for ECI Spruce
Every email to ar@, ap@ and sales@ read, sorted into a case, matched to the account or vendor in Spruce and routed to the desk that owns it with a reply drafted. A person sends, and nothing is lost in a mailbox.
Customer serviceUpdated Oct 202620 ERPs
See it work on Spruce.
Click through the steps. Fictional data, in Spruce’s terms; the real thing runs on Spruce.
- Northline Drywall · copy request
- Westfield Masonry · remittance, $12,980.00
- Oak Hill Builders · payment question
- Bayview Decks · short pay on 204317
- Summit Fasteners · invoice 77120
- Lakeside Roofing Supply · statement
- Northeast Freight Lines · freight bill
- Cedar & Stone Framing · quote request, Lot 14 Birchwood
- Pine Hollow Contractors · order status
- Unknown sender · re: your account
Every message read, sorted into a case and routed to the desk that owns it. Nothing sent.
The problem, as it happens in Spruce.
ar@ gets payment questions, remittances, copy requests and the occasional dispute. ap@ gets vendor invoices, statements and a freight bill. sales@ gets quote requests and where’s my order. Three people have the password and nobody owns a message; the remittance that explains a short pay sits unread while the AR clerk works the Aged Receivables report.
What’s lost isn’t the email, it’s the week. A vendor invoice found on day twenty misses the discount. A quote request answered on Thursday went to the yard across town on Tuesday. And the reply that did go out, from whoever got there first, isn’t on the account anywhere.
How it works.
- 1
Every message becomes a case
Each email is read and sorted: payment question, remittance, copy request, dispute, vendor invoice, vendor statement, quote request, order status, other. Attachments are read too, so a remittance PDF is a remittance, not an attachment.
- 2
Matched to the account or vendor
The sender, the subject and the invoice numbers in the body are matched to the customer account or the vendor in Spruce, with the open items the message is about beside it.
- 3
Routed to the desk that owns it
Copy requests and payment questions to AR, vendor invoices to AP, quotes and order status to inside sales, disputes to the credit manager. Each case arrives with a reply drafted and the related items beside it.
- 4
A person answers, and the case closes
The desk reads, edits and sends, or passes it on. The case, the reply and who sent it are logged on the account or vendor, and the mailbox stays empty.
How it connects to Spruce.
Lunica reads the shared mailboxes you connect and, through a read-only login to the Spruce SQL Server database, the customer account, the vendor file, open receivables, open payables and open orders in Spruce that each message refers to. The model sees one message and its attachments at a time, with the account it matched.
Nothing is written to Spruce by Lunica and nothing is sent on its own. Every reply is a draft until a person on the desk sends it. A vendor invoice found in ap@ goes to the AP workflow and reaches Spruce as a payables invoice batch a person imports; a remittance goes to cash application and is posted by your team.
What a week looks like.
- Three mailboxes, zero unread, every message owned by a desk.
- Vendor invoices found the day they arrive, not the day they’re due.
- Replies on the account or vendor, whoever sent them.
- Disputes and short pays in front of the credit manager the morning they come in.
Questions
Does it reply on its own?
No. Every reply is a draft until a person on the desk sends it. Sorting and routing are the only things that happen without a person, and a case can be moved to another desk.
What if it sorts something wrong?
The desk moves it. The sorting rules are a spec your admins edit in plain English, with history and revert, so the fix sticks.
Does it write to Spruce?
No. It reads the account, the vendor and the open items. Anything a case leads to, a credit memo, a bill, a payment, is prepared by the workflow that owns it and posted by your team.
Which mailboxes can it read?
Any shared mailbox you connect: ar@, ap@, sales@, info@, a branch’s counter address. It leaves the mail where it is and marks nothing read.
What about remittances and short pays?
A remittance is read, matched to the invoices it lists and handed to cash application. A short pay becomes a dispute case for the credit manager with the invoice and the ticket beside it.
What does the model see?
One message, its attachments and the account it matched. Not the whole mailbox and not the whole book.
Does it need a server?
Lunica runs on one Windows server inside your network, or beside ECI’s hosted Spruce, set up and maintained by Lunica. It reads ECI Spruce through a read-only login to the Spruce SQL Server database. There is no inbound connection from outside your network.
What does Lunica read in Spruce?
The customer account, open items and terms, purchase orders and receipts, the item record, quotes and order history, as each workflow needs them. Read-only, and only the rows a task is about.
Can it post to Spruce?
Nothing lands in Spruce without a person. What belongs in Spruce goes back as a Spruce import where one exists, or keyed by your team from what Lunica prepared.
What about our documents?
Invoice copies and scans keep living in Spruce document imaging. Lunica reads them when a workflow needs one and never writes to them.
The same workflow, on another ERP.
Shared Inbox Triage is written for every system on the list. You’re reading the Spruce version.
See it on your Spruce data.
Thirty minutes. We walk the workflow on Spruce data, then map it to yours.