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Invoice crowd for Customer Support

[Music] good afternoon and thank you everybody for joining me for an invoice in the crowd building a bulletproof invoice review process that your users will love so a few housekeeping items that i want to start out with is everybody's going to be muted questions if you have them throughout the presentation can be added into the questions box the slides and screenshots will be available upon request don't hesitate to reach out with any questions and then this webinar session will be recorded and it will be available through our cdi youtube channel um after a day or two today's agenda we are going to go through the five main steps to planning automation processes this isn't necessarily specific to accounts payable automation but essentially tackling any automation process in your organization then we're going to jump into a live demo some tools that you can use as well as additional resources for getting you started so planning for automation uh one of the first main essential goals to setting yourself up for success is establishing ownership and securing buy-in these two are really important because there needs to be somebody within your organization who understands the process and is capable of building out the automation and ensuring essentially that your project is being managed internally by your staff securing the buy-in is also really important to ensure that the people within the department that you're building the automation for are in agreement that this is something that they need and something that they'd like to see out of your system so ensuring that we have buy-in from everybody within the department or you know the key stakeholders such as your department managers and department team leads is really important you want them to know what they're going to get and feel comfortable with the process that it is otherwise if you spend all that time implementing a process and they decide they don't want to want don't want it you know all that time is wasted another really key part to building out your automation processes is gathering your requirements this is something that cdi spends a lot of time on now with the new deployments of you know whatever it may be is spending time learning what the existing process is and then leveraging our knowledge and tool set to convert that to a laserfiche digital process we highly recommend that you know you get a whiteboard you sit in a room together and really outline and sketch what your process is you know who it starts with how you know the documents first come to you maybe you get a majority of your invoices through email or maybe you're scanning in all of that paper you know you need to identify all the starting rules to your process and then you know do we filter and funnel our invoicing based on the vendor itself or the dollar amount you know whatever it is and outline what that process is so that we can build it out within laserfiche from there we build out the process to spec and then train staff on how to use it so that's just end user training showing them you know how they're going to interface with the process and how it's all going to flow for them so i'm going to this is just a quick overview on what our demo flow is going to look like today i have just one laserfiche demo prepared and it's going to be very simple so we're just going to drag and drop some documents into laserfiche laser piece just going to extract all the information we're gonna have a review task where i can then go ahead and take a look at that invoice that i had submitted and uh apply some line items things like that coding gl codes then it's gonna route for approval autofile rename into the folder structure archive and then the data push or and then laserfiche is going to create a data push to our erp so this final part you know depending on the version of laser feature on and maybe which which erp you're using we can either potentially push transactional data directly into your erp or create a csv import file for you where all of the transactional detail that you need is essentially put into an excel document with columns that is then eligible for importing into your erp system and then that way you are not having to re-key all of those lines after approval it just simply pushes in for you automatically so let's jump into our demo so today uh my demo i'm going to be presenting in the laserfiche cloud environment sorry let me get this powerpoint out of the way and here's our repository i'm just gonna open up our incoming scans folder typically what we recommend and a best practice for laserfiche is setting up an incoming scans folder and that's what laserpiece workflow is set up to monitor so every time you add a new document in maybe apply a certain template or just drag and drop it maybe based on user a workflow will grab that document and then kick off whatever automation process you need from there so here from my desktop i just have a few sample documents i'm just going to drag and drop them into laserfiche i'm not going to bother applying a template because in my particular scenario my starting rule is set up so that any new incoming document in this incoming scans folder as long as it contains the word invoice it's going to kick off my automation process so i'm just going to go ahead and click import and then it's going to bring these three documents into my repository i'm actually going to apply this properties to all imported files checkbox which i should have done first and then it's just going to import them all with the same property so no metadata no nothing just drag and drop the files into my cloud environment so that workflow will pick them up from here so we can see invoice number one is already gone and up here in my cloud environment i have this little green indicator which means something's changed so i'm just going to click refresh and now all of our documents are gone so what's happening is workflow based on my starting rules has grabbed those files and it's going to kick off a laserfiche forms task for me so if i go up here into my nine squares and when navigating through the repository i'm gonna go into my tasks area we can see here that i have three new tasks for accounts payable that came in today at 1107. this must be pacific time and i can go ahead and if i wanted to i could review them all at the same time within laserfiche you do have the ability to approve multiple things at once but i'm going to go ahead and just click through them so my workflow process kicked off and what happened was we leveraged the laser fish smart capture invoice tool to extract some basic information from our invoices that we dragged and dropped in and from there it kicked off this forms process so i can see here uh is a copy of my invoice um right here in an embedded iframe in my tax task so i don't have to go and open up that document i can see it right here from my file and make the changes so for some reason it didn't collect the vendor but that's okay because i have a drop down list maybe pulling again from my erp or from my laser peach folder structure of all of my vendors so i can quickly select which vendor this applies to i have a link here directly to the vendor folder so if i wanted to open that up i could go directly to the vendor folder and peruse any information that i need and then i have the information pertaining to my invoice and so we can see here that it captured our invoice total our invoice number the invoice date all from our document here and if i wanted to go ahead and break out the line items that's something i could certainly do so we've got four line items i'm gonna go ahead and just add these four line items 175 175 something that the laserfiche smart capture tool doesn't do currently is line item details but as you can see here just by having a table built in i can line item and add my my codes as needed and so i can select again from a drop-down list of gls so if it changes and if i want to attach it to a specific project that maybe it pertains to phasing you know whatever it might be additionally if i had a purchase order to go along with this i could upload the purchase order otherwise if it captured the purchase order as part of the smart capture i could go ahead and leverage the laserfiche workflow tools behind the scenes to link the two together and then from there once i've completed it i'm gonna go ahead and just sign off saying this is good and then this is going to kick off the approval process where it's going to route to my manager and then again based on the dollar amount uh it's going to route to the cfo for approval so my manager um has maybe been sitting at their desk uh just you know monitoring their email waiting for things to happen and then they get a new email for an invoice approval so in their box they have an invoice approval you have the ability to customize what this email message looks like and here is a link directly to the task and so they don't even have to be in laserfiche um they can just be sitting at their email doing their regular business click that and then it will bring them directly to their task this task when it comes through for managerial approval or whichever step it is in the process you have the ability to customize the fields the layout so that each person in your process can view the information in a way that's pertinent to them so i can go ahead and check the line items okay it looks like laura did a great job sounds good so we're going to prove that and then in my demo environment it's actually bringing me directly to the cfo approval but again they can have a email sent to their box notifying them that oh this has reached a certain threshold we need you to sign off on this invoice so go ahead everything looks good i can approve or reject it i'm going to approve it so from here that information is getting deposited into our laser piece repository and then from there anybody a part of our organization who has the ability to review vendor documentation can come into the repository and take a look at our vendor folders so if we go in here we're just going to expand that and we're going to go into rockstar industries we can see that updated today uh was our new invoices so i'm going to just sort it by last modified and if i just do a check box here we can see that all of our metadata information was populated automatically so based on the smart capture grabbing the invoice name number um vendor all that information that populated these metadata fields which i can then use for searching if i go ahead and click preview we can take a look at the invoice right here in this screen something else i want to show which i know is really important to a lot of organizations is the action history so within laser peace you have the audit trail tracking um that blew up the whole screen which is what i wanted you have the audit trail tracking so you can see who's doing what in your system at any given period of time but as you build out forms processes you can also have action history associated with your processes and so when this invoice was approved archived into the system after the approval uh we have the approval log here that was dumped in so we can see i'm gonna actually just open that up so we can get a better view we can see who approved the document when they approved it uh what that action history was if they had maybe included any notes or anything like that we could have that as part of this action history so you can again preview and have that transparency into what happened with your document additionally you can have your files link within laserfiche so as i mentioned earlier if there were a po associated with this invoice we could link that together so if i click on my details tab select a document again we'll be able to see that there's a document link so based on information that's collected on your document or that you manually apply to the file you can leverage that and workflow to link that content together so as we can see here in rockstar industries we have a contracts folder an invoices folder maybe we had a purchase order folder and if there were a purchase order associated we would be able to see a document link not only for the approval log but also for the purchase order and that way you can have all of your content associated so if we go into a different invoice we can see that that invoice log is associated so no matter where you are in your repository you can link your content together behind the scenes via workflow so again the last step in our process here once the invoices have all been approved we can build a workflow tool that will then generate a push to your erp so if we go into our accounting folder export to erp we can see that upon approval or you know whatever incremental amount you'd like so maybe this is something you want to run daily maybe you want to run it after each invoice approval you know you have unlimited options for this but it essentially creates a csv file with all of the field information pertaining to that record that we can then use to download and import into our finance system so again we can set up the columns so that they are uh ready for importing into whichever system you're using so you know great planes tyler technologies um you know any number of them out there uh will typically accept a csv import and so we can match the columns to their requirements and make that seamless for you so uh to recap here what we did on the current slide we used the laserfiche cloud environment to build a workflow that would allow me to drag and drop a document or i could scan a document into a folder laserfiche picked it up extracted some key pieces of information for me so that i didn't have to re-key at all from there it kicked off a forms process that allowed me to route that document for approval from person to person based on the dollar threshold and uh archive it in the system and then from there it's available for searching and retrieval later and you can even have your records retention applied to that file so you know after the seven years maybe you can get rid of it from your system um whatever you need so again i use the cloud environment and we used all of these tools including the laserfiche smart capture so i want to actually jump back into the cloud environment and just kind of walk you through that automation quickly so i'm going to go into the process automation tab and now if you are using a self-hosted system of laserfiche you can still build out this same type of process the smart capture tool is an add-on you know workflow and forms may be a part of your system but if they're not you can certainly add them um but one of the neat features about cloud is that you have everything all centralized under you know one roof so you don't have to navigate to different urls to get to forms or remote onto a different server to get to forms it's all just centrally located for you so we built out our starting event which again was a document getting added to the repository with the name of invoice and then from there a workflow grabbed it and let me go ahead and show you what that looks like and the workflow grabbed it extracted uh grabbed it applied some information and then pushed it to smart capture where smart capture then extracted all of the necessary uh invoice information from there so let me just sort again so it ran the capture profile and then kicked off my process to forms and then applied the metadata and filed it away so that workflow in combination with the laserfiche forms process which i'll show you is what allowed us that seamless process so if i go into accounts payable here we can take a look so again laserfiche and forms can be used in combination with each other to allow you to automate any process that you have so our starting event was the workflow kicking off and creating a starting event creating that initial form for me to review and apply all of the gl coding from there it routes creates the folder or it creates a folder and then it routes for managerial approval uh if it were denied it would go back to the submitter maybe end event that's another thing really important to consider you know if there's something wrong with your process or if it gets rejected you know what is your workflow process going to be so in that requirements gathering step in building out your process automation it's really important to also plan for what happens if there's rejection and make sure that you're mapping that out so we've got our cfo approval then it's saving uh the form to laserfiche these items with the little gear are initiating workflow processes so here it's inserting the invoice data into a table which essentially we're using to create that csv saving the action history to the vendor folder and then creating it and saving it into the folder so that's kind of the process that we built out and then if i jump back into the powerpoint i want to bring up a couple of other resources that are available to you so if you're new to laserfiche or maybe you're not new uh you have the ability to take advantage of a ton of pre-configured forms and workflow tools within laserfiche so if you just visit https marketplace.laserfiche.com you can take a look at all of the different processes that are available for you when you click the learn more it will actually bring up a brief description of what the process looks like who's involved the forms that are associated and so you can decide from there if that's something you want to import into your system additionally with those when you plop them into your system if you want to further customize them to your team and your needs and your requirements you can these are just tools to get you started so you don't have to recreate the wheel you know completely from the beginning other resources that are available are also just the cdi team you know we're here to help you with any of your project management and consulting services so we can help you spec out your process you know build a statement of work help you decide you know whether the the time estimated and costs associated are worthwhile and then from there help you deploy it and you know hold your hand really every step of the way so cdi is here to assist you with any of your process automation needs so from here i'm going to go ahead and open it up to questions so if you have any questions feel free to go ahead and put them in the chat i do see there are a couple so i'll get started um one additional thing that i want to mention is that i did include a handout today so if you're looking at the go to webinar like little screen there's a handout just the five steps to accounts payable automation feel free to download that and kind of leverage the resources within it to help you start planning out your automation let's go into the questions here so first question would you be able to write the invoice info into a relational database for the erp cassell that is possible um if you're in a cloud environment um you know with the new api changes that laserfiche has deployed that might be possible otherwise what we would probably have to take a look at is building something like what i had shown today where a laser piece creates that csv for you that you could then import into your casel database that's something i am again happy to reach out again and reach out on offline and assist with any other questions otherwise this is a pretty short and sweet webinar from cdi today if you do have anything or you think of something after the fact you know don't hesitate to reach out my contact details are here on the screen laura cdi dot support or you can give me a call i appreciate everybody's time today thank you for joining me and enjoy the rest of your week [Music] [Music] you