Collaborate on Office 365 Invoice Template for Procurement with Ease Using airSlate SignNow

Office 365 invoice template for Procurement

hello everyone thank you much so much for joining us today uh my name is Mike um I have Richard on the phone with me as well uh we're both from Dynamic point today we are going to be going over using uh Office 365 for AP automation so the presentation is going to be pretty quick we only have a half an hour so we're going to get started and get right to it I'm going to go ahead and share my screen here go over a couple slides and then we are going to get right to a demonstration of what it is that we're talking about all right let's go ahead and pause my camera go ahead and swap them up for my screen so you guys should all see a slide presentation again today's topic is using office 365. for AP automation before we get started a couple housekeeping things if you guys have any questions you could go ahead and put those in the chat or the questions section Richard is going to help monitor that for me as we're going through this so I'll go ahead and pause or go ahead and pause me if anything comes up that we could address during the presentation and then otherwise like I said if there's any other further questions we're going to have our contact information at the end and we'll go ahead and share that as well so no further Ado let's go ahead and get started um quick introduction to who dynamiccoin is and what it is that we do so Dynamic point we create applications on top of the Office 365 framework so we have a little bit of a history here before us and I'll go ahead and grab my pin right here so we started off back in 2009 back down here creating.net applications on a custom basis since then we moved to SharePoint on-premise Solutions as we've probably already figured out SharePoint on premise is being rapidly replaced with Office 365 and that's where we are today so we have followed this evolution of technology and our products have gone through various iterations and refreshes and rebuilds just to support the new technology so now we are entirely in Office 365 based software company and all of our products do reside on that platform so that's just a little bit about us um as far as our product portfolio we have several products we have a customer vendor an employee portal product this uses the concept of an Office 365 SharePoint Extranet to share data with either customers or vendors so including things from my Erp such things as orders sales orders purchase orders invoices things like that that I want to collaborate with my various external parties whether they be customers or vendors we have an expense management product which basically manages the reimbursement of employees again using an Office 365 app but today's focus is going to be on AP Automation and our whole focus is not on our product today we will be showing how it used in conjunction with these Office 365 technologies that in general today's presentation is just more of looking how I could use Office 365 to automate a business process and today we're going to focus on applying that to AP invoices so like I said our product will sort of pop its head in there and we could show you what it does but there's no you know necessity to buy our product for this to hopefully be a valuable session to you because I'm going to show other features that just come with the Out of the Box Office 365 tools so that is an intro of us and our portfolio um talking about Office 365 right so obviously that term encompasses a lot of products and we pull in different applications where it makes sense so Microsoft gives us this whole ecosystem to sort of build products right and it's very similar to like an app store um for your phone anytime you add an app to your phone of course to ask you these questions can I use your camera can I use you know send you notifications use your location things like that and that is of course the app using the platform provided by the iPhone or the Android device and we do that same thing but Microsoft provides a whole framework for companies like us to build these solutions that leverage their Office 365 tools so basically we're over here on this leftmost side and you can sort of think of us as a piece of this overall pie but the framework for our products as well as these business processes that we're going to discuss today namely invoice automation is SharePoint SharePoint is going to provide the framework from a security perspective from The Branding from a document management it is really the glue if you will or the foundation of what we're going to be discussing today and if you're familiar at all with Office 365 tools SharePoint is the anchor for a lot of things right teams OneDrive um you know building power automate workflows all of those often come back to SharePoint as sort of be in the home or the foundation for that and we're no different right our product will be added to um SharePoint for document storage for workflow Microsoft gives us this other tool by the name of power automate power automate is their workflow engine it is extremely you know flexible you could create all kinds of triggers and actions and decision trees and things like that where you're going to leverage that for routing invoices and pushing them for approval when it comes to extending these features and by developing you know custom apps or forms or things like that we're going to pull together both power apps and forms both of those gives us the ability to sort of extend the product so we could you know create custom methods for capturing invoices mobile phone applications you could do forms for doing check requests and things like that so there's a lot of flexibility in using powerapps and forms to sort of extend the interface and then last but not least is power bi so that's going to serve as the reporting tool of choice power bi has native integration to SharePoint so I can bring all of that data directly into Power bi and begin building reports and analytics on all this information all right so enough of a an intro we're going to talk about the process of invoice Automation and then we're going to immediately jump in to start showing us how that works in office 365. so the first step of AP automation is this first step here of getting the invoice or what I'm going to call invoice receipt so a vendor is going to give me an invoice of course and I need to get it right and ultimately what that means to us is it's going to come into this invoice Library this invoice library is going to capture all of the invoices that we need to process from a company perspective now the first step is how do I want to get those in there right and that's where all of these options on the left hand side come up so I could email all right I could use a monitored email inbox to receive that to an AP inbox and then go ahead and bring that right into the invoice Library I could give my employees a check request form all right so they could go ahead and fill this out and submit this to AP and that will go again end up in this Library I could do something like a mobile upload right so I could take a picture of this and upload it to the library if applicable I could do a portal entry where I give my vendors a portal such that they could submit invoices into that portal and again it'll end up in that Library and this is the first step we're going to cover the second step is going to take us to the processing of those invoices which is basically using you know our application and account assignment in Vendor assignment and the other aspects of of Erp financial data also this is we're going to use power automate to Route this for a review and approval and then the third and final step is bringing that into an Erp system ready for payment so let's go ahead and look at that first step the invoice capture all right so here's my dashboard um for the sake of you know transparency here this is really just a SharePoint site there's really nothing special about this site um I have added our app to it but again a lot of what I'm going to show you today is not really dependent upon our application so I just have a SharePoint site that I've created it is using office 365. I've sort of laid it out based on those steps that I just discussed so this is receiving invoices into a library this is my processing queue I've been processing these AP invoices after they've been received and this is just a link to my Erp to show those that have already integrated as well as I've included some sample reports here so this is my aging by vendor total report which is again using power bi in an unapproved invoice aging showing how many days outstanding I have for the various invoices again using power bi as a framework so let's start off with step one receiving invoices so I'm going to go ahead and open this up and what you're going to see is an empty library right so nothing too exciting here um but I'm going to go ahead and talk about the ways that we could capture these invoices and the important thing here is you know invoices and rounding from approval without automation are generally done on Outlook right that seems to be the go-to solution people will forward these send them to you know managers for approval can you take a look at this or whatever else what we're going to show you is you don't have to quote unquote abandon those in tools entirely but you could use you know the framework in SharePoint to add a layer of management and transparency to that um to get you toward automation without changing you know or buying really anything because all of these of course are tools that you already own if you're an Office 365 subscriber so let's go ahead and start off and I'm going to pretend to be a vendor and this first scenario I'm going to talk about is me submitting an invoice to a shared Central Library right so here's my invoice coming from Acme Corporation again I'm pretending to be a vendor and this inbox is going to be my AP processing inbox and I'm just going to say I'm going to submit a Consulting invoice and I'm going to send that and this is going to be an AP inbox that happens to be in Office 365 inbox and I happen to have a workflow Associated to that that's going to take any invoices and add them to this Library and of course I'll show you why in a second but if I refresh here sometimes it takes a second or two and sometimes I look really good and that happens immediately okay invoice comes in all right there's my invoice and if I refresh really quick bam you're going to see all of those columns populate with data right and what happened is I monitor that inbox using a power automate workflow of which I could show you and after it was received we performed OCR on it and we submitted it to an OCR engine got all the data out of it and then after receiving that metadata it's going into our product as an invoice that's ready to be processed so that's why you saw it disappear but even that first step so let's talk about you know the value there um basically as opposed to that just going into an inbox and being routed right for review and approval it has been captured and I could use OCR to extraculate some of that key data of that invoice that will later of course be used for integration but could also be used for such things as workflow how much is this invoice is there a Dollar threshold Associated to the approval Etc so let's talk about this from a technical perspective right this is you know what I'm saying tip number one is I could use power automate to Monitor inboxes and bring those invoices directly into SharePoint and then of course later perform OCR so the first one I showed you was Outlook right and that coming into an inbox power automate picked it up and then it was stored in SharePoint so let's go look at the form idea the form idea is interesting because it basically can um provide a check request form so our check request form is is interesting if I have invoices going to people you know in my organization that ultimately are going to forward it to accounts payable so these are managers who are maybe buying these Services they're getting the invoices and then they're just handing them over to AP but as opposed to them you know just willy-nilly sending it to me in an email I want to give them a more strict process a regimen process of being able to fill out a form so this is just using a Microsoft form again I'm capturing some data here some things like purchase order or maybe a cost center Associated to it an invoice ID amount and then they could upload the invoice go ahead and grab that one okay so a few Concepts before I submit this one again powered by Microsoft forms you can add as many fields as you want why would I do this as opposed to email the biggest thing is I can enforce data collection that I don't have to go back and forth and ask people for so OCR could obviously do a lot of this like the vendor name and the PO number OCR could pick up on but maybe things like the requesting cost center um or you know an approving manager or something like that I need someone to specify data that's not going to be recognized by OCR on the invoice a form gives me the ability to do that right because I could put fields in there and I could require them and give a more formal process to my company using you know a simple Microsoft form as opposed to them just emailing it to me and saying hey can you pay this so when I submit this form what's going to occur is it's going to again be picked up by a workflow and added directly to that library for processing so similar to the email example if I refresh you'll see that form and if I refresh again you should hopefully see the data on the form as well as any result results from OCR that I picked up added as metadata to these columns so let's look at how we did that right so we introduced that concept again here was the slide where we introduced it it's coming from forms it's coming from Outlook we're using power automate and that data is being received into SharePoint so I happen to have that workflow open just so we could go look at it it's actually pretty doggone simple so here on new email so I'm using an AP automation inbox that I submitted it to you can see here's my steps within power automate I create a file and I pass the file that was included on the email I get the properties of the file and then this is actually where it's getting submitted to our OCR engine so this is posting that to OCR and then getting the results of OCR and updating that in the SharePoint Library that is the email example same idea with the form right so here I'm using the form connector a power automate vendor invoice submission as soon as that is submitted get the data create the file so same idea for both all right so let's go back and talk about the next step so the next step is I mentioned after um it got uploaded to that Library we wanted to provide some Automation in the form of OCR so what I could do now that I have um that data in this Library there's all kinds of tools that I could use for OCR I could use third party there's Microsoft AI Builder there's the App Store there's you know just using that document Library as a framework there's all kinds of on-prem tools that integrate with SharePoint libraries but I could call any of those using this workflow including Microsoft AI to extraculate the results of of any document so in this case I happen to be applying it to an invoice but it could easily be you know a contract or a PO or whatever I could use that workflow to submit it to OCR and extraculate key dates from that and store it directly in that Library and let's go ahead and discard that if we were paying attention to my workflow here I actually upload it right here so we are using a third-party OCR tool cloud-based OCR by the name of verify and we just pass it the invoice and it gives us the results so you can see we passed at the invoice and then the next step here is to receive the response from that invoice and then go ahead and update the file properties directly in SharePoint with the results and you could actually test this on our website so if you go to our website and you go to products invoice automation you'll go to our easy AP 365 page and if you scroll all the way down there's a little comment here under the question and answer section saying how well does OCR work and there's a link there that will give you the ability to upload your own invoice it'll immediately perform OCR on it and then you could see the results of what it's able to extrapolate so it's sort of a cool tool you could go ahead upload an invoice if I were to grab one it'll immediately submit that to the OCR tool and give you my results and you can see if you were to incorporate this you know what what type of reliability it would give me and honestly the results I find are pretty doggone impressive so this is the invoice image on the left hand side this is what it was able to extrapolate from a nice clean presentation perspective but if I want to look at all the data there's actually all of the data that's being extracted here so you can see all of the lines Associated to it the skus the dates Etc all right so enough of that let's go back and go back to our process diagram well it's one more back okay so what we're talking about is the different ways we could receive invoices right which was the different ways that I could capture that and use OCR so this realm right here but now that we have them we could process them right so processing them is going to get a little bit more intricate with our product po matching GL account assignment as well as the involvement of workflow for routing and approval so let's go through that really quick and I'm going to go ahead and click this AP processing dashboard here and what you're going to see here is all these invoices that I've been submitting now are captured in our dashboard so really from a you know AP processing everything this is where you would start right everything else I was sort of showing you beforehand is the technology supporting it of if when accounts payable comes into play this is really where they're starting these are seeing all the invoices coming into the system they're all in these Auto created status they have the invoice Associated to it such that they could look on that um you know we have the accounts that have been allocated Etc so everything else was just building up to this and this was really where our AP users are coming into play and everything else behind that was just sort of the technology supporting it so um what's happened right I have these invoices in these dashboards I have a status Associated to it I have the results of OCR come in in the play um I have validation so if you see this this is double checking this invoice number against my Erp saying that it already exists if I were to go ahead and make this number unique here by just putting today's date what you'll see is that it will re-query the Erp and then um that warning message will go away because now it's going to be unique it's not going to be flagged as a duplicate so I have these invoices in these dashboards I have various statuses our product does support both po as well as non-po invoices if a PO invoice came in as opposed to adding those allocation items it would have matched the item directly from the pl so these are all the PO items that are being queried directly from an Erp that would have come in automatically but we're going to focus on our non-po example and we're going to go ahead and submit this submitting this is going to kick off yet again another workflow right but this workflow is now going to be there for review and approval so it's going to Route this to different managers using a hierarchy or a delegation of authority that I've configured in the system so let's go ahead and submit a couple just for the fun of it to get a couple going here so let's close out a couple of these tabs and I'm going to find my email and now if I'm pretending to be you know someone more from a reviewer perspective as opposed to accounts payable this would be the manager coming in the play and the manager is going to receive an email which will take a second or so to come in requesting their review for that invoice while I'm waiting for my email I could actually show you the teams integration as well so teams you know is very coupled with SharePoint so everything that I've been showing as far as this invoice dashboard looking at these invoices uploading invoices all can be done from teams as well so I could upload new invoices from teams and have OCR kick off from there I could do my processing directly from teams my check request app you know the form of I could obviously do from teams here I have a little bit more sophisticated as a power app but in addition to the submission I could also do the approval so if I go to the approval tab here this is using power automates integration with teams and you're going to see all of the invoices that I have for me to review sitting in my queue so here's the two I just submitted and I could click on this directly from teams or who of course from my phone and if I click on this link here I'm going to get the details of the invoice I'm going to be able to look at the invoice itself I'm going to look at the allocations associated to it potentially even have the ability to edit it as it's going through the workflow so you have a lot of options as far as presenting security to the reviewers on can they edit it as part of the workflow so that was me coming from teams if I go back to my email now those emails have come in and I have that same task presented to me in Outlook so my reviewers could have the image Associated to it so this is the invoice itself on the notification here you can see we've put some of the key data like the invoice number the amount Etc and then they could approve or reject it directly from the PO or from the email they don't even have to leave Outlook foreign so whichever one you you know choose to do is really up to you because if I were to go back to teams now you would see that that invoice is no longer pending my approval so I believe it was the first one I submitted and which one was it well this one maybe right so if I try to prove this guy that one's approved and then that other one you can see just got updated as approved as well so regardless if I did it from email or from teams both of those tasks got cleared out from IQ and both are showing as approved all right so that was the manager perspective of course I could have additional reviews after that but let's go ahead and go look at the invoice and see what sort of changed from accounting side so if you notice my invoices are actually disappeared they're not really gone they're just being filtered out here but if I were to clear my filter what I'm going to see from the accounts payable side is I have a full audit of each step that's occurred in the workflow so I have all of the um reviewers as well as what their action word that they approve or reject it as well as if they entered any notes so here I you know my reviewer said it looked good and the date and the timestamp associated to that um we'd also establish permissions for who could see which invoice so we are you know using this line item permission model that their different people have access to invoices both from a reviewer as well as a submission or a submitter perspective and then the last tab you're going to see here is the transaction that got created in real time in my Erp application so this is actually the transaction that got created in AP um this happened to go into Dynamics GP but we support you know many different Erp applications in fact we have a going back to our site if you go to Integrations invoice automation you'll see a full list of all of the products that we integrate with from AP automation side so that was really it as far as what I wanted to take us through and the scope of this call um I wanted to end it on why you would sort of do this so if I go back to my slide here you know really the goal here is using what we own right if I look at the sort of building blocks of what I showed us we had Erp integration we had a repository for invoices we have workflow we incorporated OCR all of this bigger piece of this pie here is really being provided by technology that you guys are anyone who has purchased Office 365 already has in-house what we're adding is this smaller piece of the pie here which is providing you know the business logic as far as account assignment and then um the Erp integration such that the invoice is created in an automated fashion and our goal here is of course to use all these things that you own so it could be done you know in a less expensive um manner but also more flexible because all of these tools are very robust right the workflow is you know incredibly robust the OCR engine SharePoint Etc there's just so many capabilities there that we're able to pull in by using this platform so on the last slide here before we close it up we're going to get a little philosophical we're going to talk about a concept that's called the buyer key so I'm sure if you guys have ever studied philosophy in your history there's the hierarchy of needs well here we have the hierarchy of needs and it's similar right if you're familiar with the hierarchy of needs but you know on the lowest level here of of you know costs if you will because of course as I transfer up this things are going to get more expensive is using what you already have and then of course I work my way up to borrowing and swapping and thrifting and making and then ultimately buying a product right but the more you're able to accomplish of course in these lower levels the more money you save and that's really the inspiration for our products is that we are using this platform that our customers already own and we're adding ourselves to that mix to harness that technical technology and that functionality that they've already purchased so I could see we're right about at time here I have half past the hour I'm going to go ahead and put up our contact information we'll go ahead and follow up this um presentation with the slides if anyone's interested as well as our contact information on email but here it is if if you need it thank you everyone for taking the time to join us today and is there any questions Richard or anything we need to address there actually is a quick question here can you give a quick look into how PO process works we're interested in using this for creating approving POS s sure so purchase orders is a little bit interesting right because purchase orders are generally going to reside in another system in an Erp application so what happens is we're not storing those but when a invoice with a PO comes in it actually queries those items and adds those automatically using OCR to recognize that PO and adding those items to the invoice so the invoice that I submitted in my example was a non-q invoice so it came over with allocation line items because there's the need to assign GL accounts po items recognize the PO and come over with po items so that's why um that's why we're picking up PO from OCR and we're using if I you know show you manually if I click that new po button that's actually querying the Erp in real time to get all of the invoices that are I'm sorry all the POS that are open for that vendor so you don't have to click it manually OCR would pick it up and add those line items for me and then we use the workflow to process exceptions right is the invoice within the amount of the PO is it within some tolerance does it need some additional level of approval but the workflow engine gives us that capability because now we can um apply rules to it anything else Richard was that it that is it though and then re-reading that question it's possible the question also was related to more a purchase requisition process versus a PO matching process okay so that's another one we do have a requisition process it is using a power app to request the purchase unfortunately I probably don't have a ton of time to go over that today but I can most um we can reach I'll reach out to the the person who asked the question and we'll get that covered great otherwise in an effort staying on schedule here we're going to go ahead and um in the webinar wanted to thank everyone for their time today and for joining and again have a great day and I appreciate your interest so thanks again