Explanation
Key concepts and roles
The key terms, the roles in your company and what FlowEngine does automatically.
Last reviewed October 30, 2026 · Version 2026.10
This article explains the key terms in FlowEngine, who in your company takes on which tasks and which work steps FlowEngine handles automatically.
Who FlowEngine is for#
FlowEngine is aimed at companies that regularly process business documents in purchasing: requests, offers, orders, order confirmations, delivery notes and invoices. Typical users are:
| Role in the company | Typical work in FlowEngine |
|---|---|
| Purchasing and procurement | capture and compare offers, check orders and order confirmations, resolve deviations |
| Clerical processing | upload documents, review, correct and approve recognized data |
| Invoice review | check invoices against order and delivery (invoice management is not yet generally available) |
| Administration | invite members, set security policies, manage intake addresses and integrations |
Roles#
Every account belongs to exactly one company and has a role:
| Role | What it may do |
|---|---|
| Member | works with the documents and procurement processes it is responsible for or has created |
| Administrator | sees and edits all of the company's documents and processes and also manages members, settings, intake addresses and integrations |
A company's data is never visible to other companies. The System administrator is a role of platform operations and belongs to no customer company.
Responsibility for a document#
Who may edit a document follows from its responsibility, in this order:
- the person the document is explicitly assigned to,
- the person responsible for the procurement process the document belongs to,
- the person who uploaded the document.
The responsible person and administrators may edit a document. Whoever uploaded a document or is responsible for a related process without being responsible for the document may read it. Without edit rights, FlowEngine shows You only have read access to this document.
Key terms#
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Document | a received file together with its recognized data, for example an offer as a PDF |
| Document type | the kind of document: request, offer, order, order confirmation, delivery note, invoice or credit note |
| Document processing | the automatic path from a file to structured data: acceptance, recognition, extraction and plausibility check |
| Extracted data | a document's recognized header data (fields) and line items |
| Confidence | how certain recognition is about a value; uncertain values are marked Needs review |
| Review queue | the list of documents that need to be reviewed |
| Work queue | the open tasks for the documents you may see, on the Documents page |
| Approval | the confirmation that a document's data is correct; afterwards the document is read-only |
| Procurement process | all documents of a purchasing case from request to invoice, for example offer, order and delivery note |
| Deviation | a difference between related documents, for example in quantity or price |
| Offer comparison | scoring several offers by price and further criteria; depends on your plan |
| Intake address | an email address through which documents reach FlowEngine; every account and every company has its own |
| Integration | a configured transfer of reviewed data from FlowEngine to a target system, for example an ERP system |
What FlowEngine does automatically#
| Work step | Automatically | By your team |
|---|---|---|
| Check and accept the file | file type, size and malware are checked | – |
| Read the text | text layer and text recognition (OCR) for scans | – |
| Recognize document type, header data and line items | through AI-assisted extraction | review the result |
| Check plausibility | review hints, for example for missing information or totals that do not match | follow up on the hints |
| Correct values | – | in the detail view |
| Approve | only if your administrators have set up automatic approval | otherwise manually |
| Assign to a procurement process | through references such as order or offer numbers | check the assignment and correct it if necessary |
| Detect deviations between documents | yes | assess the deviation and decide |
| Export or transfer data | through configured integrations | trigger exports manually |
FlowEngine does not change approved data on its own and does not correct deviations automatically. The business responsibility for a result lies with the person who approves it.
Availability of functions#
Not every function is available in every company. Offer comparison and integrations depend on what is enabled for your company, email intake on how your installation is set up. Invoice management is in preparation and not yet generally available. Areas that are not enabled do not appear in the navigation.