Discover the Proper Invoice Format for Teams to Streamline Your Billing Process

Proper invoice format for teams

hello everyone mike from dynamic point thank you so much for joining us today we'll be starting here in a short minute on today's agenda for our webinar is automating ap invoices specifically using the microsoft teams interface um we'll jump around a little bit show other options but for the most of the uh next half hour we're going to be focusing on how you could leverage the team's platform to automate accounts payable invoices specifically with the dynamic point ecap365 application so we'll give everyone a quick minute here to join will also do my best to monitor the chat window as we're going through this so if you have any questions i will do my best to address those either at the end or as i have breaks throughout the presentation okay i have about a minute after um we have a lot to go through and unfortunately just a half an hour here to keep it brief um so i'll go ahead and get started um so just a quick introduction of who dynamic point is and uh what it is that we do um so dynamic point creates apps applications on top of the office 365 framework um so from an analogy sake we are basically an app development company very similar to an app that resides on your mobile phone whether it be an iphone or an android device and i'm sure we've all installed products on those um on a phone before and as you those products it typically asks you if you could use various services of your mobile platform including the camera notification services location services things like that and that is very much our approach from an application development company again we are leveraging um products within that framework and then leveraging all the functionality that comes with the office 365 suite office 365 has not been around that long we've been around a little bit longer since 2009 so we used to create products on top of sharepoint and then about five or six years ago have recreated all of our products for specifically the office 365 framework all of our products do offer integration with various erp and crm systems we have various integrations with all of those and leverage the apis provided by those products to again automate various business applications using that framework with real tie-ins to your erp or crm system keep it going as far as our application lineup today our focus will be the invoice automation product the scope of this application is automation of invoice receipt specifically coming on the accounts payable side from vendors for either po or non-po invoices workflow and routing ocr capabilities assignment to such things as accounts and other financial objects within your erp and then ultimately bringing that transaction in as an invoice that is ready to be posted and paid in your erp system we also have a portal product which enables a customer vendor and employee portal as well as an employee expense those are unfortunately out of scope for today just given that we have a limited amount of time again focusing on invoice automation a little bit more about our product approach so we're again leveraging this office 365 platform and our app is deployed to azure so again it's 100 cloud-based uh and leveraging the platform provided by microsoft all of our products have their own of course functionality to them they are installed as what are known as sharepoint apps so sharepoint is providing us the security the branding the document management and really the user interface and framework for our products for workflow microsoft gives us another tool by the name of powerautomate previously called flow for mobile applications specifically such things as check request or mobile approval things of that nature we're using the powerapps platform for capturing additional details maybe vendor onboarding and things like that we're using the forms application and then last but not least for reporting and analytics we're using power bi so all of these generally come with most office 365 subscriptions so just a little note there we're not necessarily selling any licenses for office 365 with our products we're adding to an ecosystem that our customers already own and use okay enough of the introduction now we're going to talk about the invoice automation process we'll be going through various aspects of this again focusing on the microsoft teams so this will be the framework for our demo over the next 25 minutes here generally speaking invoice automation comes down to three major steps if you will first of all is getting that invoice from a vendor or in other words the receipt of that invoice invoices could come in from various different manners and they're ultimately all coming into this library or sharepoint library that's being provided by your sharepoint office 365 subscription vendors could email these vendors these invoices in we could establish check request forms if those invoices are being submitted from within the company in sort of a distributed buying environment they could be mobile uploads we could have portals for entry obviously the traditional scanning to libraries if it is received in paper apply drag and drop uploads from teams all of those are options on how you can capture the invoice that's ultimately coming from those vendors into your office 365 environment and that's really the first step in the process by bringing that invoice in it's now obviously digital and captured and it could be you know saved for future use repository for that information archived etc so taking that paper getting rid of the necessity to keep files for those and bringing it into a digital library the second step in the invoice automation process loosely we call processing this can involve various steps including the application of templates in our product for such thing as defaulting gl accounts or other financial dimensions it can involve workflow for routing and approval reviewers could also be involved in the assignment of those invoices to accounting aspects or accounting objects and then as well as bringing in the capability of ocr to automatically recognize fields from those invoices so they don't need to be manually typed in or you know translated that could be done in more of an automated ocr fashion and the last step in the process is bringing that invoice into your erp or your accounting system where we're usually going to do one of three types of transactions the type of transaction we're going to create is really going to depend on the type of invoice it is if it's for a po then we're either going to create an invoice match or receipt match depending if it's a two-way or three-way match po if it's a non-po invoice then we're going to go ahead and create a payable transaction such that it could be paid directly to the vendor without the need for a pl so again really much depends on how those invoices are coming in as well as if you're using the purchasing components of the erp or they're just coming in as miscellaneous payables so enough of the introduction we'll go ahead and get to the demo let me go ahead and get out of that and we will go ahead and share our dashboard so this is our ap processing dashboard i have various calls to action on this dashboard all of these calls to action are ultimately corresponding to those three steps that i just mentioned so this is invoices coming into the system in the nature of received invoices this is my processing key representing those that are going through workflow or coding and then last but not least is just a link to the erp product where i could see those that have already integrated and come into the product other things i could do i have a dashboard here leveraging power bi showing unapproved invoices by vendor total as well as in aging so this is obviously a sharepoint site i'm looking at it just from a browser perspective as promised today we wanted to go ahead and focus on the team's interface so i'm going to go ahead and get out of the web browser and bring over teams and that's going to be the basis for most of our time today on how we can do everything within teams so the first step that we wanted to talk about is submitting those invoices so we're going to show various methods for submission so i just have a teams channel set up here i have some various tabs across the top but let's start with the first one and that i want to have a employee within my organization upload an invoice directly to teams so that's a pretty simple process i could go ahead and upload find the invoice on my computer and go ahead and upload it so that seems simple enough what is happening now in the background that that invoice has been kicked off or received is we're performing an ocr process and bringing this directly into our application so in addition to recognizing all of the fields that are on this sample invoice so here's my sample invoice that i just submitted we're extrapolating such information as the invoice number the date obviously the amount associated to that and then we're applying the template and bringing that right into the product i will show you the results of all of that in a minute but for the sake of mentioning other submission methods we could go through those as well so like i said this was just a simple upload i could drag and drop here but if i want a more controlled interface or maybe i'm asking more details from my team members as they're submitting these invoices i could create a simple form again i'm leveraging this from teams fill out some required fields here it's asking me for such information as the invoice id the amount again an upload to that invoice go ahead and find that on my computer upload the invoice and then put in any associated comment that i want again this is a very much a configurable form i could capture any of the details i want if i want to have something like project number or po i can most certainly capture those on this submission as well so again these are all methods in which we're basically leveraging a check request in other words the invoices are coming from more internal team members there's also the ability to do that from an app as well so in this case i have a application that is using the powerapp framework of which i could fill out here or if i would prefer to have these invoices submitted more in a mobile fashion i could go ahead and drag across my phone open up the powerapp platform and complete the necessary details in order to submit this invoice to get it into the application and begin the processing associated to it so this we happened to develop for one of our customers um that's a farm they wanted invoices to be received as people are incurring the expenses and buying various things from the farm and they wanted to be mobile friendly so they could upload all these things from the comfort of their truck as they're going around and supporting the operations of the farm so i could go ahead and take a picture of it i have an invoice sitting here on my desk and then accept that photo and go ahead and submit the invoice in that manner so as i introduced at the beginning there's all kinds of different ways i could get invoices into this system if these are coming from directly from vendors there's also other options for that as well simple email so here i have a shared inbox going to ap automation which is representing my accounts bill the department as well as the consulting invoice same invoice i submitted previously and vendors could submit this directly from email as well so from our perspective it doesn't matter all of them are ultimately going to go into that same place that you saw me upload it which is the received invoices so here's the one that i'm just scanning in if i continue to refresh this screen i'll see the one that i just submitted via email so you can see that's been received and as i mentioned in addition to kicking off an ocr process and recognizing all of the key fields that are coming in on this invoice we're also using templates within our system to assign accounts so enough of the submission methods we will move forward to processing of these invoices after they are received regardless of the method so i showed a handful there but we'll go ahead and go to the processing queue the processing queue is going to involve our application where all these invoices come in and as i mentioned we've applied templates associated to them so if i look at all of the invoices i could see now they're in the auto created state any of the details coming from ocr have been recognized so the invoice number the date the amount it's been mapped to a company and vendor by nature of the submission method so in this case i used the email that i uh sent that email the receipt from to determine the vendor that that's associated to in the erp product as well as we're performing validation against the erp so you can see a warning here that i already have an invoice under this number and we're going to go ahead and update that so that becomes unique the reason this is a duplicate is because i used the same receipt for a lot of my demos here so it already exists for this vendor and then i'm going to go ahead and update the posting date associated to that again in addition to all of the details being captured from a metadata perspective we are of course displaying the invoice as well so the invoice is entirely captured too other things you can see here is those default allocations those did come from the assignment of the template again we are leveraging teams to show case most of this if your users are not necessarily in teams and if i would just merely go to the website i would see the exact same information there so again that's that same invoice i just modified again i have the ability to drill into the actual invoice and see that you can see i've updated the invoice number and things that i did from the teams interface as well as i could modify any of the accounts now the one i'm showing now is really a non-po invoice if this was a po invoice i'd be doing matching as opposed to account assignment so the interface is a little bit different to show the real-time integration with the erp i'm just going to go ahead and create a po example really quick to show you how we're in a real-time fashion pulling data from the erp product so something like the vendor we're not storing any of that information within our product is our real-time calls to the rp and if i were to create this invoice manually as opposed to the other submission methods that we just discussed we see we really support three types of invoices a receipt match otherwise known as a two-way match in your erp an invoice match where a shipment has already been posted or an allocation in other words a non-pl invoice if i were to add items for po matching we're querying the erp application and giving you the ability to add those items directly from the data that exists in the erp so we're leveraging those pos that have already been created and i could add those again in a live query fashion in real time to the invoice so a little bit different depending on the type of invoice that's coming into the system so i'll go ahead and go back to the one that i previously submitted from teams just to focus on that one again i could use the submission method to kick off a workflow associated to this if the invoice comes in and everything is already known and doesn't need to be edited or reviewed from accounts payable perspective we could automatically kick off the workflow as well so i'm going to go ahead and submit it by submitting it we are going to utilize the power automate workflow tool to route this for review and approval so we have a workflow configuration within our product my workflow happens to be cost center based so this invoice will be applied to a threshold and go to various cost center reviewers for review and approval again just to jump back to teams here so now moving forward through that step you can see here i received a notification coming from my team's feed if i were to click on that you can see i have a new invoice that's ready for approval depending on my permissions i may want to drill back and edit this or i could prove or reject it if i were to go to my channel i could also see it directly from there as well let's go back and leave my feeds and go to my team here and go to my reviews so what i'll see here is that same request again leveraging that power automate interface for that invoice review and approval so again i have the ability to look at the attachment approve or reject it maybe reassign it to a different reviewer or click a link and edit it directly in our review product if i'm not hanging out in teams and i'm more of an email outlook type person i also received a notification directly to my outlook inbox so you can see here i have a new invoice ready to review as that comes up we'll see that the invoice has been included on this as well as some extrapolation of the metadata assigned so here i'm seeing details from the invoice and the ability to approve or reject it the drill back capability gives reviewers functionality to review the invoice as it's going through the workflow so if your reviewers are important to assigning such things as accounts and participating in the po match capability by me clicking this link it's going to go ahead and update or open up another window here showing the details of the invoice including the allocation from the reviewer screen i could obviously see the invoice itself as well as a full audit history so the workflow is generating an audit report of each step in the approval process any reviewer notes that have been entered along the way as i am the first reviewer there's no notes at this time and then lastly the ability to add attachments as it's going through the review process so maybe i want to add a bill of lading or a shipping document something to substantiate this as it's going through the review process i can most certainly add any supporting documentation as well and then last but not least there is a mobile app associated to this as well so if your reviewers would prefer to review it in a mobile app microsoft gives us a power automate app where i could look at all of my invoices that are ready for review and approval again click the review link look at the attachment and then approve or reject it directly from my mobile phone for the sake of today i'll go ahead and use this email just given this up in front of me and i'll say this looks good and i'll go ahead and submit that review again the reviewer options very similar to the submission methods is entirely up to you you know people work differently some people prefer to work in teams other people prefer to have their email open the whole time and others would rather just see a queue of all the invoices all of those are of course possible if you watch my screen there i did get a notification that this has been final approved and what that means is the invoice has now gone through the workflow process and fully integrated with the erp product so if i were just to go back to this web dashboard here you can see my invoice is still under review i'm going to go ahead and refresh my screen just so i could get the latest status because i did leave it open see the invoice actually dropped out of my queue but if i remove my filter here i can see the status of it has now been updated to submitted what that means is we have integrated this invoice with the erp system as it has gone through the final stage in the workflow basically a step that we call the final review or the final approval me basically just the last person in that workflow again for the sake of simplicity i kept a really simple workflow there just with a single tier approval if you want more steps of course that's possible but for the sake of getting through this and the time i have allocated i keep the workflow pretty simple if i were to look at this invoice just to see what's captured as it's gone through the workflow process you can see here i have some notes those are the reviewer notes that were entered as it went through the workflow the audit log has been populated for each step in the approval process so i've captured not only who was it assigned to but then the outcome whether or not they approved or rejected that if they would have rejected that invoice of course it would have just gone back to the submitter to go ahead and handle that and resubmit it in my case i wanted to fully approve it so it continued to go through the workflow process the other thing to note about this dashboard is we are applying permissions based on the reviewers so if i were to go into this dashboard not only as an ap person but more as a manager i would only see those invoices that are pertinent to me so i could obviously look at where they are in the workflow look at the audit logs not only from an ap perspective but also from a managerial perspective to monitor the invoices that maybe i was part of the approval process the attachments is where any supporting attachments will shown would show i didn't add any so that's currently blank and then the last tab is the transaction that has just been created in your erp product like i said we do offer various erp integrations this one that i'm showcasing today is a microsoft dynamics product but you could see that transaction as well as the status of the invoice in a real time query from the erp so as that invoice becomes posted and paid in the erp product i will see the latest and greatest status of that invoice so just going back to our presentation here and beginning to wrap this up trying to keep us on time so go ahead and share my presentation again as i mentioned we were going to go through these three steps to receipt we showed the different methods coming in from email upload from teams a check request form that i populated a mobile entry etc so all of those various options we kicked it off for workflow we use templates in our system to default accounts routed it for approval and then that third and final step was bringing that in as an approved invoice directly in our erp product again the um advantage of our products is if you look at the various components that are involved in invoice automation there's erp integration obviously we need to get po data the vendor information the account assignments etc directly from the we need a repository by which we could store these details obviously archive invoices have them searchable etc we need ocr capability to recognize various features and extrapolate data from those invoices and then lastly we need a workflow engine for routing and approval the advantage of using this office 365 framework is a vast majority of this functionality comes from the products that you already own with your office 365 subscription so really what micro our dynamic point is adding to this is our app which is really providing that tie-in to the erp and specific invoice functionality such as po matching account assignment templates and things of that nature or the bulk of the work such as the repository the workflow ocr is all coming from this office 365 framework so again just sort of like an app that you on your mobile phone that's leveraging such thing as the camera and things like that all of that is being provided to us by the office 365 platform running out of time so i just wanted to go ahead and thank you everyone for joining if you have any interest in our product our email is listed there at info dynamicpoint.com our website of course as well as my personal email again thank you everyone for taking time out of the day i very much appreciate it we'll go ahead and follow up with my email contact if you have any questions thank you have a great day and a great rest your week take care you