ForwardThis vs Rossum
Rossum and ForwardThis are not competing for the same budget, and pretending otherwise would help nobody. Rossum is enterprise intelligent document processing, now owned by Coupa: transactional documents arrive by email, scanner, portal or PEPPOL, an in-house document model reads them without templates, a person clears exceptions on a validation screen, and the validated result is checked against master data and posted into SAP, Coupa, NetSuite or Workday. It is bought by a department, on a contract. ForwardThis is one person forwarding one email with a sentence written on it, and it never opens the attachment. Reading transactional documents at departmental volume favours Rossum; acting on a single instruction favours ForwardThis.
ForwardThis and Rossum, side by side
How it works
What it reads
Who handles exceptions
What comes out
Sold as
Runs without you
Free plan
Paid from
Apps
Undo
Rossum pricing and limits checked 5 September 2026.
Which one fits how you work?
Choose Rossum if
Thousands of invoices a month have to be read rather than filed. Rossum's model reads the document itself, line items and handwriting included, and claims coverage of 276 languages. ForwardThis has no answer to this whole category of work.
Exceptions need a person and a screen. The validation interface exists so a human can correct a field in seconds, and each correction trains the model further on that customer's own documents.
The data has to be trusted before it lands. Master data matching, duplicate detection across ingestion channels and custom business logic all run before anything reaches the finance system.
It has to fit a finance stack that already exists. Certified integrations cover SAP and Coupa, with NetSuite, Workday, Oracle and Dynamics alongside them, and Rossum is now owned by Coupa itself.
Procurement will ask for the paperwork. Rossum lists ISO 27001, SOC 2 and HIPAA, offers single sign-on, sandboxes and a preferred cloud location, and puts unlimited seats on every plan.
Choose ForwardThis if
The budget is a person's, not a department's. Rossum's published entry plan starts at $18,000 a year on a one year minimum contract, while ForwardThis starts free and costs $15 a month for 100 actions.
The work is one email, not a document stream. There is no queue to configure, no schema to define, no volume to forecast and nothing to sign.
The email says what to do. What a forwarded email needs is a decision written in a sentence and then carried out in a connected app, rather than a set of validated fields handed to a finance system.
Somebody wants to undo it. ForwardThis replies with a confirmation of the work it did, and reversible work can be undone for 24 hours.
What a single forwarded email does
The trigger is the email you forward. There is no editor and nothing to design in advance. This whole job is one email. In Rossum it would be a queue and an extraction schema set up first.
Kestrel Freight
PO 4120, two pallets held at the depot until Thursday
delivery-note-4120.pdf
Your instructions
File the delivery note under Kestrel, move the goods-in task to Thursday, and tell the warehouse channel two pallets are short.
SharePoint
File delivery-note-4120.pdf
Logistics / Kestrel Freight
Asana
Move the goods-in check to Thursday
Inbound deliveries
Microsoft Teams
Post the shortfall notice
Warehouse
Kestrel PO 4120 now arrives Thursday, two pallets short. The rest of the load is unchanged, and the delivery note is filed under Logistics.
Sent after approval
You receive a confirmation email once complete.
Setup in 30 seconds.
What is ForwardThis?
ForwardThis is an ops assistant for your inbox. It turns email into action, without the hassle. Compatible with over 145+ of the apps you use every day.
Works with any email
Compatible with any personal or professional email provider. Gmail, Outlook and more.
145+ apps
Works across all the apps you already use every day. With more being added every month.
Setup in seconds
No complex setup, apps to install or workflows to build. Sign up, forward, done.
Secure & private
ForwardThis only acts on the emails you send it, and no data gets retained after actions have been completed.
Try it with a real email.
Forward any work email to the address below and see what ForwardThis can do. No signup required.
Occasional product emails may follow.
FAQs
- Can ForwardThis read an invoice and post the total the way Rossum does?
- No. ForwardThis reads the text of the email and the name of the attachment, and never the contents of the file. If the total is written in the email, it can be used. If it exists only inside the attached PDF, it cannot be read at all. Reading transactional documents is what Rossum is built for, and it is not something ForwardThis attempts.
- Is ForwardThis a Rossum alternative?
- Not for accounts payable capture. A team processing an invoice stream and measuring its straight-through processing rate is doing a job ForwardThis does not do. For the emails that reach one person's inbox and each need a different thing done in a different app, yes, though at that point the two are not really in the same market.
- How does Rossum pricing work?
- By quote. Plans are priced on the volume of pages or documents processed and the complexity of the workflows, seats are unlimited, and going over the limit means either upgrading or paying per additional page. The published entry tier starts at $18,000 a year and the minimum contract length is one year, with a 14 day free trial to try the platform first. ForwardThis is 10 actions a month free, then $15 a month for 100 actions, with no contract.
- What does the Rossum validation screen do?
- It is where a person and the model meet. Extracted values are shown against the document so a reviewer can correct anything the model got wrong or could not resolve, and those corrections feed back into continuous learning on that customer's own documents. It is a deliberate design choice: the exceptions get human attention and the rest flows through. ForwardThis has no review queue, because there is no stream to review.
- Is Rossum still an independent company?
- No. Coupa acquired Rossum, having already embedded its document processing inside its own accounts payable product beforehand. Rossum continues to be sold as a platform in its own right, and Coupa remains one of its certified integrations, so this matters mainly for anyone weighing up a long procurement cycle.
- Does ForwardThis suit a finance team at all?
- For the admin around the documents rather than the documents themselves. Filing a signed order in the right client folder, logging what a supplier said in the email, moving a delivery task, telling a channel what changed: all of that comes from the message and the instruction on it, and none of it needs the file to be opened. The invoice stream itself belongs somewhere built for it.