Classifications: Teaching Ventorie What Your Emails Are

A classification is how Ventorie recognizes a kind of email — a vendor invoice, an order confirmation, a freight quote — plus what to extract from it and what to propose. The built-ins cover the common supply-chain mail out of the box. Find them under Workflows → Classifications: every one is a row you can open, edit, and switch on or off.

Click any row to edit it. You can rewrite how it's recognized (your description replaces the default — useful when a vendor's invoices look unusual), add fields to extract, add extra actions, or turn its default action off while keeping the classification itself. Turning a classification off doesn't hide those emails: they're still identified, you just handle them yourself. If a misclassification keeps happening, editing the recognize-when text of the right classification is usually the fix — describe the emails the way you'd explain them to a new hire.

New classification creates one from scratch: name it, describe when it applies, list the fields to extract, and pick what happens — open a case, notify you, reply, dismiss, run one of your workflows, or any of the record actions below. Duplicate an existing classification to start from a worked example instead of a blank form.

Your classifications can use the same record actions the built-ins run on: draft a purchase order, record a vendor invoice, confirm a PO, record an inbound shipment, approve freight, record a payment or sales receipt, update pricing, send the PO to the supplier, and more. Each action fills itself from the email the way the built-in would — the matched vendor or PO, the extracted amounts and dates, line items matched to your products — and the builder shows exactly where each value comes from. Two guarantees: if a required value can't be matched on an email (say, an unknown vendor), Ventorie opens a case instead of guessing; and record changes from your own classifications always come to the Inbox for approval — they never ride an auto-approve rule. Actions that offer choices work too: point an action at an extracted list of options (like tiered pricing) and each entry becomes a pick-one radio in the proposal, exactly like the counter-offer card.

An email gets exactly one classification — but it's often two things at once: an invoice that also encloses certificates, a shipping notice with the bill attached. An also-applies rule fires on top of whatever the email is classified as, so both halves get handled. Tick "Also-applies rule" when creating a classification to make it one.

Every classification and rule can carry a structured condition — only when all (or any) of a set of checks hold. Checks read what was extracted from the email (extraction.invoice.amount), what Ventorie already knows (context.followup_match.kind — e.g. "we're awaiting a reply on this PO"), or what the email already proposes (proposed.types). Conditions are exact and free — use them for thresholds and states; use the recognize-when prose for anything that takes judgment to read from the email.

Tuning the built-ins is part of Operations, alongside the Inbox itself. Authoring your own classifications, also-applies rules, and workflows — including putting record actions on a classification — is part of Autopilot. On Operations, an Autopilot classification (like a freight quote) is still recognized — Ventorie files the document and opens a case for you, and the proposal notes the step it would have automated.

Some work happens after you approve — like pushing a journal entry or payment to QuickBooks. If that fails for a reason only you can fix (an expired connection, an unmapped account), Ventorie notifies you once with what to do, keeps retrying in the background, and finishes by itself after you've fixed it. No action is lost silently.