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Office 365 invoice template for R&D

hello everyone mike from dynamic point thank you so much for joining us this morning or afternoon today we're going to be looking at cloud-based ocr with office 365 specifically it's integration with our invoice automation product um i think we have about a minute before the top of the hour here so i'll give it a little bit more time and then we'll go ahead and get started and again thank you everyone for joining all right ing to my clock here we're showing top of the hour so we're going to go ahead and get started we have a fair amount to get through today today will take us a half an hour or just thereabouts thank you again for for giving me your time today i do appreciate it the agenda for today is that we are looking at cloud-based ocr and specifically its integration with office 365 products and how it could work for invoice automation uh with our easy ap product um a couple little housekeeping things i will do my best to look at the questions as we're going through it so feel free to chat any questions in that question um dialogue there and i will do my best to pause as we're going through it and answer anything that comes up so with no further ado we'll go ahead and get through it um my name is mike morrison i head up business development for dynamic point so we're going to do a little bit of an introduction here and then we'll get right to the content for today so just a quick slide introducing who the heck dynamic point is and what it is that we do so dynamic point we create apps on top of office 365. and i'm assuming most everyone on this call is fairly familiar with office 365. basically in addition to the standard sort of products that we all you know come to know over the years such as powerpoint and outlook and things like that microsoft with office 365 includes some enterprise products such as workflow and reporting and in addition to that they provide a whole ecosystem for companies like us to create applications within that framework and the best analogy that i've been able to come up with for those who are not familiar with that framework is it's very similar to like a mobile platform right we've all installed apps on our mobile phone before um asks us various questions like can it use our camera can it use my location and things like that and that is essentially the app of course using this framework that's being provided um by the mobile platform whether it's an iphone or android or whatever and essentially we are doing that same thing but we're living within this business framework of office 365. so we are leveraging that platform wherever we can using this framework to make our products you know not only more functional but leverage what you use or already own i should say to make it more affordable as well we've been around a little bit longer than office 365 so we used to create products on top of sharepoint and about about eight years or so ago began moving everything over to that new framework so that's a brief history on us as far as our product lineup we have a customer vendor and employee portal app that basically takes a sharepoint extra night and includes integration with erp and crm data and reports we have an employee expense management application that you know obviously for the reimbursement of employees on incidentals um neither of those are the scope of today today's scope is looking at the invoice automation but not so much focused on our app but how i could use office 365 in conjunction with these cloud-based ocr tools so at the tail end of today we'll look a little bit of how our app and how it sort of works with these various technologies but the first and the primary focus today is how i could use cloud-based ocr just with office 365 technologies and we'll walk through an example there so enough about us a little bit about our approach and how are these tools are working and some of the tools that i'll be covering today you know so we create apps within this ecosystem but again there's all these tools that are our framework or our ecosystem of products that are enabling these solutions and our apps are basically deployed to sharepoint and sharepoint is really providing the framework or the front end if you will it's where documents are stored in this case we'll be looking at storing invoices there it's the security associated to it you know if anything it's microsoft's go to as far as a repository for not only data but documents they give us another tool here for workflow by the name of power automate that's very handy for not only routing invoices for review and approval but what we're going to see today is i could take invoices and route them or i should say submit them to a cloud-based ocr tool and get the results back there too so we're going to look at how i could use power automate to integrate office 365 with various ocr providers power apps and forms these are different you know app informed technologies that we could leverage to create such things as like a check request submission or a mobile upload of an invoice in addition to doing a mobile upload we could also you know require certain fields and have certain logic that's provided by these platforms and then last but not least power bi is the sort of go-to reporting tool from microsoft now that all this data is in office 365 we could use some of that to begin looking at reports and things like that all right so that's just a little bit about the tools that we'll be using let's get to uh business here on ocr so a few definitions just to catch everyone up right so the concept of a web ocr i'm on this first bullet right here is basically a cloud ocr tool that is being offered as a service and there are numerous providers out there that offer one i'm going to be showcasing one today but there are several options for you to choose from and this requires no right and that's one of its advantages and basically the way it works is i could upload a document the cloud-based service will then extrapolate the key fields and then it's going to return the results to me through basically a web service call and we could show you how it gets those results and how it passes those back to me so as opposed to you know the old days i used to have to uh ocr you know have it on a server and whatever else and create templates and do all kinds of fun things like that um this cloud service is basically this you know web-based service that i could submit it to and then it performs ocr and then immediately gives me back the results so that obviously has been growing in steam for the past you know 10 20 years it's not nothing new but it is much gaining power as you know the tools and the artificial intelligence aspect of it becomes more powerful so within ocr there's um a couple competing technologies and there's several but the two main ones are this concept of zonal ocr and zonal ocr you can almost think of it as like a plot up right and i have an image what represents like an invoice or any type of document and i want to have a template like a vendor template that looks for you know various zones or areas on that document for key information right so if the invoice number on a document is always in the upper right it knows to look in that area and nature of it being in the standard format it knows you know quote unquote where to get the information from and these have been around for a long time a very powerful tool um a little bit you know effort in setting it up because i have to create vendor templates and if my vendor changes their invoice format of course i have to go adjust that along comes you know machine learning ocr and you know this is towards the realm of artificial intelligence i don't know if i would you know say it's quite there yet but the concept here is that you're using um a template free you know environment where the data is digitized in other words something that's buried in an image or pdf is turned into something searchable it's searched and then with keyword matching and data processing rules i could begin extrapolating the information from that document so the beauty of this is i don't rely on templates anymore if someone submits an invoice i you know provide it to this service and it's going to provide its rules and give me the results without me having to define you know various vendor formats and locations on documents where the data is that i'm trying to extrapolate so moving forward you know comparing these two what's the benefits right zonal one of the biggest benefits is you have full control right you get to define your templates and with that comes a lot of power i can extrapolate information that's maybe non-standard you know if i'm a pink company and someone's submitting an invoice to me that has a color of a paint or something like that that's very specific to my industry i could create templates for obtaining that information and something of that you know level of um of detail is probably not going to be included on a machine learning ocr platform so that's the one huge advantage there on the machine learning side there's a lot right and by no means am i advocating one or the other they both have their advantages and sort of time and place the machine learning you know i could learn now from all of my customers um you know trial and errors in other words there's a feedback loop there that if ocr does not perform successfully then you know i can um submit that feedback loop and by submitting that feedback loop you know it takes that into the model so the next time that comes around it should be better so easy to set up you know there is no vendor templates so that in itself is a huge advantage because vendor templates are quite a lot of maintenance and depending on how many vendors you're doing business with um that could be you know a lot of effort to set those up so those are the advantages of this right is it's very much more of a black box i submit an invoice to there it gives me the results zonal is typically within my control i got one question there regarding foreign languages so of the various ocr tools that i've used they have a list of languages that are supported and by translating this invoice you know into something digital or any document for that matter it's going to try to recognize that language and by recognizing that language then it's going to extrapolate that key information of the tools again you know i think they support various languages quite a few of the ones i've seen most of my experiences probably in english and spanish just given north america based but those seem to do quite well for those languages i can most certainly give you a link here that you could try it out for different languages if you have invoices in various languages and see how it does so all right now let's talk about these two types and how we want to integrate those with office 365 right so we're going to start off really simple and i'm going to get out of here and i'm going to open up a sharepoint site and on this sharepoint site i'm going to navigate to a simple library and my simple library here is called invoiceupload now this is pretty much just your basic sharepoint library but i've pre-configured a couple columns here and the couple columns are things that i care about extrapolating when i submit invoices into this library right so this library is going to become my repository for invoices that are coming into the system so as opposed to them you know being buried somewhere in a file share or email i want the central repository for um collecting ap invoices and when they receive here i want to you know get this key data out of these invoices using ocr so i want to capture maybe the company name the invoice number the amount the date po number etc from those invoices and have them in columns as opposed to buried in a you know an attachment so i'm going to do there there's various ways that i could get a attachment or invoice into this library probably the more popular of course is vendor emailing it but for the sake of demonstration i'm going to go ahead and just upload one so i could drag and drop it so i have my windows explorer over here and i will grab a simple invoice and it's a pdf and just bring it over here and voila it's uploaded right so nothing too special there and now i have my invoice in this central repository so what's going on in the background though is the fact that that invoice was uploaded it's now kicking off a ocr process and this document this invoice is being submitted to a cloud-based ocr tool and it's going to populate the columns with the results of this data so i'm going to show you the power automate flow that that handles that really quick i'm going to refresh because um should be coming in shortly here oh all right so there we go so before i go show you the workflow let's look at the results right so it looks like i got the invoice number the amount the date it got the po number associated to it and now i have all this data here in columns and i could you know begin using that for further processing whether it be account assignment or whether it be workflow and things like that i could start using this because it's no longer just buried in an image but it's now true you know metadata that exists in columns so we could look at how it did right it got the invoice number it got uh the price total pretty good it got to due date all of that looks good i got the purchase order so it did a pretty good job on this invoice so before i um show you the workflow let's talk about how the cloud-based ocr is managing this so let's go ahead and open up um a link here and i'm going to give you a method that you could try your own right so if you go to our website you simply go to invoiceautomation and you scroll down to the very very very bottom and the question and answers there's a little question here saying how well does ocr work and if you click this link it'll provide you a redirect to the cloud-based ocr tool that we typically bundle with our application um someone asked the question you know can you use the the zonal or the um you know the machine learning with our product you can we're not really attached to one invoice ocr tool or another i just really like this one and have really good luck with it so what i'm going to do here is we're going to demonstrate it so i'm going to go ahead and grab another invoice so i'll grab a different one and they say i'm not a robot oh timed out i'm gonna have to refresh my screen and do that again sorry and you can see it's processing that file that's my information here we'll go ahead and fill that out and show me the results okay so the left is my image the right is what ocr was able to recognize and you can see here i got the vendor name i got the address pretty good i got the phone number the category so it took that vendor and tried to categorize it got the invoice number the date the bill to as well as it recognized the line items as well for a total of 110 dollars so this is a pretty view of it if you click the other tab you actually get the raw data and that raw data all of these tags that you see here are all of the different options of fields that have been successfully extrapolated from that invoice that now i could capture and return to that library within sharepoint right so i have all this data this is what this cloud-based tool is providing me and now i can write this information back to that library so let's talk about how you do that easily stated it's a workflow so here is power automate and i'm just going to go ahead and edit this guy really quick and you can see here it is kicked off by a simple action when a file is created so power automate is the workflow tool that is monitoring that library and what's going to happen is anytime a file is created in that library it is kicking off this workflow it's sending me a simple notification that's nothing obviously required that's just for my convenience to know something has been submitted and then it's getting the file properties and the real quote-unquote you know magic here is you can see it is uploading it to a web-based service by the name of verify so we have an account with verify it's submitting that invoice to this cloud-based tool and getting certain content that i care about right obviously there's a lot of fields if you recall but i really only care about certain ones so i'm going to get out of the edit mode and look at the one that we just did four minutes ago and see the results right so here you can see here's the execution path of this workflow and if i go into the upload to verify you can see here is my file that i uploaded and the response is the data that went right back into the library right so in fact i take that information and i update the file properties back in the sharepoint library so as simple as this is it's it's really powerful i mean you can use it for invoices you can use for contracts you can use it for anything that you're uploading um because now i have data that was previously buried in an image in a digital format by nature of it being submitted to a cloud-based ocr tool so let's talk about you know where we go from there right so now i've submitted it it's wrote this information back and i have key data right and this key data you know from an invoice automation perspective is golden because now it could be used for workflow and account assignments and things like that that are ultimately needed to take this invoice um potentially match it to a po even and you know submit it to an erp system for payment so i will show that but before i do that you could also let's talk about different submission methods right so we did a simple upload but of course vendors aren't going to upload this invoice for me they are probably going to email it to me so i have another workflow here that takes this email to a accounts payable account so i our um inbox so i have ap at dynamicpoint.com i'm going to pretend to be a vendor here and i'm going to go ahead and submit my acme invoice and by sending this it is using another workflow right so i have another one in here that's based off of an email trigger as opposed to a file this one right here and what you're going to see on this one that the action is is when an email is received so on new email to this ap automation folder then it's going to move it to that library right so let's go ahead and go back into that library and it may take a minute or two so we don't have to wait for it up there it is that was pretty fast right so here's the one that just got submitted by email and the exact same thing is going to happen on it right it's going to be submitted to ocr and then i have the results of them okay so all that is talking about you know just getting this data in so let's go ahead and go back to our powerpoint and move forward here so the ocr integration you know just to recap relate right there i happen to use um a third-party product and the document library here is serving as my repository so this is using a sharepoint document library but you know ocr is very um you know numerous as far as the tools out there so you can most certainly use the legacy on-premise product microsoft ai offers ocr on the app store there's several other tools too so you know with power automate i could call almost any workflow or i'm sorry ocr tool and really it comes down to which one works best for me right if there's a need for doing zonal ocr templates then i would probably leverage one that uses more of the template method as opposed to mine which was more the machine learning i didn't have to create a template i just gave it an invoice and then it did the rest from there okay so again this is all sort of in this first step here right where this is all in this first step of invoice receipt and then you know what our app does um is sort of takes it over from there and then we apply um templates as well as po matching we've integrated it with workflow and then our app also does this third and final step here bringing it into the erp system so this first step by itself it's still very powerful right because even if i was just receiving these manually or via paper or via email you know that method of receiving them in a central repository and performing ocr and then i could even do a simple workflow on that library for review and approval is you know obviously much better than nothing but what our app does is then takes that from there and continues it forward and we could show you that really quick so if i were to go into the app right so all those that are coming into that library they ultimately get based off of a template and what we call a trigger they get brought right here into our application and now we've combined you know the results of ocr which you could see it has populated various fields so i could take the data here from what ocr was able to capture the dates the amounts etc and then i could begin doing things like applying templates right and templates can include such things as gl distributions so maybe if i'm always working with a given vendor i want to go ahead and default such things as departments and expense types or if i'm doing po matching maybe i want to bring in po line from a purchase order that match what ocr was able to extrapolate from that image in addition here we're also doing validation with the erp so you can see here it's saying it's a duplicate reason being is i submit the same test invoices quite often so we could put in our date here 2022 maybe update the uh date here so it doesn't hit a closed period and update it and you'll see that this invoice is now i'm gonna pass the check in other words the warning messages are gone all right so i received that the ocr came in and now i have this whole dashboard board for uh bringing in more of the accounting features such as account assignment as well as kicking off a workflow review and approval so if i click the submit button here it's going to actually use my department assignment to assign this to a manager for review and approval so that manager will receive notifications either via their phone or email notifications saying that they have a new invoice to review and approve so that should come in pretty quick here sometimes it takes a second oh there it is i think i hear it oh there it is okay so now i have a new invoice that's ready to review and approve again it's showing me the results of ocr i have the scan invoice right here that i could obviously take a look at and then i can approve or reject it if i need to edit this i also have an edit button to edit the assignments as it's going through the workflow i can say this looks good and then of course if there was additional steps from a workflow perspective this invoice would continue to be routed through it and upon the final step is when we all create that invoice in the accounting system so if i went back to my dashboard you can actually see that invoice that i was previously working on is gone it's not really gone it's just being filtered out so if i clear my filter here you can see it's a status of submitted and in addition to you know capturing the notes that i entered so that was my reviewer notes we have an audit log of each step in the workflow as well as we are showing the erp details of the transaction that was just integrated with the erp so you can see it started from a simple ocr process and extrapolation of that key data using the cloud-based ocr and then the app is of course adding more of that accounting data processing appeal matching as well as integration with workflow as well as ultimate integration with the erp to bring that transaction in in a real-time fashion so i see we're just about time here so i'll wrap it up as far as you know what we're trying to accomplish here from the approach if you look at the things that go into this aspect of invoice automation you know we focused a lot on this ocr one sharepoint was serving as our repository for all these invoices coming in we also did a simple workflow as well as brought that into an erp really so much of this is being provided by tools that our customers already own right all of this comes with office 365. we're adding our app to this picture and then that is enabling us to provide all this functionality hopefully at a much more competitive price than our competitors because again we're using what their customers have already purchased from microsoft so ing to my watch here i'm right at the half an hour so thank you everyone so much um for joining i will send a copy of this recording out in case anyone is interested uh otherwise have a great day and enjoy the rest of your week thank you so much for your time bye now