Streamline Vendor Invoice Automation Dynamics 365 for Enterprises

Vendor invoice automation dynamics 365 for enterprises

Hello and good morning. Good evening everyone. Welcome to our TechTalk regarding the invoice capture for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations. Today we'll be talking about the upcoming features and the roadmap for the product as well as what's changed with the release to GA versus what was previously covered in prior TechTalks around the preview version of the invoice capture functionality. My name is Kevin Giardini, I'm a member of the D 365 Finance ACE team here at Microsoft and presenting alongside me is Rayne Zou and I will hand it over to Rayne. Thanks Kevin. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening everyone. Yeah, for the ones who don't know me, my name is Rayne Zou, I'm the Program Manager from Dynamics 335 finance team. I'm owning the whole account payable module. Today I will give you the presentation for the introduction of the invoice capture of the GA version. I know a lot of people or customers has already started journey of the invoice capture. So coming to the agenda today, first I will give you some introduction about the AP invoice process and we will give some brief introduction about the invoice capture and the whole vendor invoice automation solution provided by the Microsoft Dynamics 365. For the next I will deep dive two big sections. First is guides you how you could our solution and what kind of change we have been made compared with the premium. I also will introduce some configuration setup might be useful for your advanced features. And the next I will give you the guidance how you could process the invoice processing in the invoice capture. And next I will give you what we have been achieved and what is coming for the invoice capture. Later I will give you some resource link and also the most frequently asked question about the pricing for our solution. And I will also reserve some time to directly answer some questions. So let's jump to the introduction. So for traditional AP invoice processing so we could go through different steps. So first you needed to capture invoices from the vendor side by different external channels, for example the post email file server and you needed to capture this invoice in a central place. And once this invoice get captured, you needed to key in the invoice into the ERP system. Then you needed to do the validation by comparing the invoice against the purchase order and the product received. So this is a well known three way matching to validate the correctness of the invoice. And if there is some discrepancy you might need to do some approve process to approve whether this invoice get posted or not. Once it gets approved then you can do the posting. So this is a typical invoicing processing to be done and as you know once these steps are all done manually, it will cost a lot of time for the AP clerk. So companies are seeking for the whole solution to automate the whole process to save the time for the AP click microsoft provides end to end solution for the AP invoice process. So in the past we have introduced the invoice automation already in the FNO side starting from the right after the invoice getting imported it will start to apply the prepayment, do the received matching and do the validation workflow and do the auto posting. These jobs are triggered by the automation processing badge job behind and once the invoice is getting posted if the auto payment proposal job is also triggered then the payment journal will be automatically created. So with these automation features it has already saved a lot of time for the AP clerk to process the invoice and the feature has been used by quite some customers in the past and meanwhile we are continuously to improve the function performance, different perspectives. But we're still looking at the last piece that at the very beginning, we needed to capture these invoices and then make it compete before imported in the FNO. That's the reason we introduced the invoice capture solution. For the moment, the invoice capture solution can only handle the paper invoices and in our roadmap we would like also include the E invoice into the invoicer capture to make sure all the invoice to be landed in a central place to be processed. And if we look at the detail of the invoice capture, it's split into four phases at the beginning in the invoice capture we have a concept called channel. The channel actually defines the ways how you receive the invoice from vendor side. I will give you some detailed introduction in the later configurations part. And once this invoice is sent via this channel our invoice capture will successfully capture these kind of documents and do the file processing. And in the file processing we actually will call the AI builder model to do the recognition and we use this prebuilt model and which doesn't require any training efforts from the customer side and once this recognition is done it will send to the capture invoice staging phase. In this phase we will apply derivation, validation logic depends on different invoice types. I will introduce what invoice types later in the later section, and then if the invoice compete, it will automatically transfer to the FNO. If it contains some errors, we also provide a nice UI called Side by side viewer to help AP clerk to correct the invoice and in the FNO side, you can decide which invoice framework should have used to proceed the Invoice. We have two main frameworks in the FNO, one is vendor invoice and one is invoice journal. We have some settings to let you decide which framework should be used. Next I will first give you demo to show you how the whole process works. The procure to pay process works. In this session, we will provide an end-to-end demo to show how we use invoice capture to automate the procurement to pay process. Inga, the purchasing manager of Contoso ordered some sound equipment from Fabrikam Electronics. Meanwhile, the equipment needs to be installed by specialists. She created two purchase orders in the system. Fabrikam Electronics confirmed the purchase order and delivered the goods immediately. Sammy, the shipping and receiving manager confirmed that the goods had been received and logged the receipt entries in the system. Fabrikam Electronics also sent the specialists to the sound equipment. After the product receipt was confirmed, Fabrikam Electronics sent the first invoice via email and the second invoice via SharePoint. April, the AP clerk from Contoso needs to check and process the incoming invoices. Let's see how she works in invoice Capture and Dynamics 365 Finance. April 1 opens invoice capture application in the Power Platform. Then she clicks the captured Invoices menu under My Work to open the list of invoices. The invoices are shown on the top of list under the default view, which means the invoices need to be amended. April clicks the invoice number and it jumps to the details. A modern sidebyside viewer is opened which shows the original document on the left side and the extracted information on the right side. The document header shows the derived value for legal entity, vendor account and Invoice type. If the legal entity or vendor account is not identified or the values are not correctly determined, April can click the classified Invoice in the ribbon to manually select the values. By clicking Start view button, april can correct the invoice. The message pane shows an overview about the number of messages with different severities. By clicking the messages, it will navigate to the corresponding invoice field or invoice line. If it is an extracted field, April can click the eyeball to highlight the place of the invoice field on the original document. April reviews all the fields and correct the errors and warnings. Then click Complete review by clicking the transfer button. The invoice will be transferred to the D365 Finance system to generate a pending vendor invoice status. Transferred and notification message will shows the invoice has been successfully transferred. Now, April open the Dynamics 365 Finance system and goes to the pending vendor invoice list form under Accounts Payable module. The list shows the pending vendor invoices are successfully generated from invoice capture. By clicking the View Automation History button, April can view the status from the automation history. The state shows that the first invoice has succeeded in automatic prepayment application, automatic receipt match and automatic workflow submission. The invoice is then routed to April for the approval ing to the settings in the workflow. By clicking Workflow button in the dropdown, April approved the invoice. The invoice is then automatically posted by repeating the same steps. April approved the second invoice as well. When those invoices are successfully posted, the open transaction entries will be created in Dynamics 365 Finance. The payment proposal job helps to create the payment journal automatically. After the scheduled job is executed, april can go to the vendor payment journal and check the details in the latest entry. The payment journal entry has been created automatically by clicking Settle Transaction tab. It shows that the open transaction has been marked for settlement. This saves a lot of effort for April to create the payment entry manually. As we can see with invoice capture, Microsoft provides a complete end-to-end solution to automate the procurement to pay process. So after you view our demo, you can see our Microsoft Dynamics 365 can offer end-to-end manual invoice automation solution to the customer. So compared with the other OCR solution, what's the advantage to use our invoice capture solution? First is that we are a first a party solution which integrates with Dynamics 365 and offering Autobox solution with the most functions ready. Yeah. So for you, you can directly the solution and do a minimal customization or configurations to have a try for this solution. It won't cost much effort for doing that. Meanwhile, we also introduced the preboot model in the Autobox. This pre boot model is empowered by Microsoft AI builder team and the team will continually enhance this model and it currently can support the most common layout of the invoices within different languages. As I mentioned, we're also offering a nice UI for the AP clerk to efficiently review and correct the invoice in the invoice capture processing we're offering some continuous learning features. This learning feature can remember the last correction you have been made for determining the entity values. And once the second invoice comes, this entity value will be automatically derived. So it will increase the overall touchless rate of the invoice processing in the invoice capture site. And the last is, as I mentioned earlier, that we are offering the two ways of the invoice creation in the FNO site. So these are the advantages of the invoice capture which we offering. In the next I will give you deep dive, some deployment and configuration for using the invoice capture. Here I outline the steps how you needed to do to deploy our invoice capture solution. I will go into details one by one. So at first what you needed to do is you needed to ensure your FNO version meets the following requirements yeah, the reason behind is we introduced some configuration and we also introduced the batch transfer mechanism and these features was introduced under this version. So make sure your FNO match this version before you the invoice capture. And the second is quite important is that invoice capture currently can only support the integrated Power Platform environment. So when you define an environment which is not natively integrated with FNO, you will get some errors during the installation or when you use the invoice capture, you will have some problems. So how could you distinguish whether your environment is integrated or not? So here I list the point you needed to check. Actually in the admin portal you can go to the environment detail to check whether you have a field called Finance and Operation URL under the environment detail form. If it's there then it's integrated environment and meanwhile once it is integrated environment normally the virtual entity solution will be automatically installed but sometimes we also find out the virtual entity is not installed successfully within the integrated environment and our solution is highly depends on the readiness of the virtual entity. So please also make sure the virtual entity solution has been successfully installed in your solution in the environment. Once your FNO version match the criteria you will find a new feature in the FNO which called Invoice capture for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operation, and you need to enable this feature. After you enable you will find the invoice capture specific settings on the accounts payable parameter setup and in these settings you actually needed to define the following first is you needed to decide the onboarded illegal entity for using the invoice capture and there is a single or vendors flag if you mark it. It means that later when you create or change any vendors within this onboarded legal entity it will automatically sync this information to the invoice capture side. And the second option is this is a control whether you needed to transfer the original attachments from the invoice capture to FNO and we are defaulting this on because once this transferred you will also see the attachment by default showing in the pending and invoice detail form. And the third is the mapping between the invoice type against the framework which you would like to use to post the invoice. So for PO invoice, we only allows you to post on the pending invoice framework because all the process is automatically done. So we would recommend that you could use this framework to post or proceed the full relevant invoice and for the cost invoice. You could either decide to use the vendor invoice with non stock item or procurement category and also you can make it simple to direct post the cost invoice into the invoice journal. And some people ask when it is using the invoice journal whether they can use the own like a journal name to post the invoice coming from the invoice capture. The answer is yes, because we actually leave some public method to let you to change the default journal names yeah via some extension code and once the environment is set up and after version meets the requirements and the corresponding feature is enabled so you can start to the invoice capture. So what you can do is you can directly go to the Microsoft app source and search this Invoice capture for Dynamics 365 NS. You will find our solution there and by clicking the free trial you will start the installation and it will ask you to select correct environment. Please make sure you select the integrator environment as I mentioned earlier, it might take some time to complete the installation. After the installation is finished, just make sure the invoice capture solution is showing up in the Power Apps > Apps. And then here you needed to make sure what you the invoice capture version is higher than 1.1 because I still see a lot of people using the preview version here I would like to mention a bit that the preview version will be deprecated soon. So if you are using, please make sure you do the migration to the GA version as soon as possible. After your installation you also needed to define the users who started to use the invoice capture and there are two main roles. First is the accounts payable admin, who can do the system setup and also can have the access to all the invoices and for the AP clerk they can only view the invoice on their signed legal entity and I list the ways how you could grant the required legal entity on the deep setup. And there is one thing here to mention is that for operates the invoice capture the invoice processing in the invoice capture you also needed to have some special role or privileges to get access to some virtual entities. So in the FNO side we define a new role called the invoice capture operator. So this role has to be assigned to the corresponding user as well otherwise you might have some issue to fetch these virtual entities. And for the environment maker it's specifically for you to define some flow or doing the one you like train your own AI builder model in the future. So this environment maker normally should assign to the admin to do some additional advanced setup. And now we are coming to the conversion part. So first very important is the channel. As I mentioned earlier that the channel defines how you receive the invoice from the vendor side. In our solution we predefined some templates to you to create the channel easily. When you create the channel behind the scene, we will generate the power automated flow with the correct trigger and connection type. And as you can see on the right side, this is the flow generated from the template and you can do some additional setup or advanced settings within this flow. And meanwhile, as you can see, we have this managed flow toggle this toggle is you can define unmanaged flow version. Then in this case you can just record the channel ID and you can use your API call to directly send the invoice to the invoice capture. And we also have this assigned legal entity option if for some business they have multiple legal entities different receptor email for different legal entities. So in this case they can create different channel and assign decrease bounding legal entity on each channel. And then the legal entity will automatically derive during the invoice processing the invoice capture site. And previously I mentioned in the FNO you needed to onboard the legal entity and you can also mark the sync all vendors actually in the invoice processing the invoice capture site. We needed to use sync the legal entity and vendor master data to apply some derivation logic to derive the legal entity and vendor accounts. So what we could do is that you needed to double check whether this legal entity or vendor accounts are correctly synced and there is one thing you needed to keep in mind is that the initial vendors synchronization has to be triggered manually. So once it's done, you will have the whole master data to be synced. And the next is regarding about the manager file filter. So in most case, customers are receiving different attachments. Sometimes it's voice relevant, sometimes it's not. So the file filter somehow helps you to filter out these non invoice relevant documents based on the size, file type or the name. And this file filter can be applied on each channels. And it's a little bit different between the condition on the flow setup. So once you define this file filter and once the invoice comes and doesn't match the rule of the file filter, these files are still going to be seen in the invoice capture. It requires your double confirmation whether you need these files or not. But if you define some rules in the flow setup these files will not be imported in the invoice capture, it will be blocked at the very beginning so you won't see this file again if this condition doesn't meet in the flow setup. So it's a little bit different. Okay, the next is the most important settings in the inverter capture which we call the manager conversion groups. So in the conversion group we have three parts of the settings. The first is to define the condition which you need to do the review. By default it will select as error only, which means only when the invoice contains the error it will review the invoice. But in some cases if you want to say the invoices anyhow needed to be reviewed, you can set this option as always and the confidence score setting will decide the severity of the— actually when the invoice getting recognized it will return the detailed fields with confidence score and if the confidence score is low, it might take your attention to check the correctness of the values and based on what we saw, that the values in the most case it's correct and it gets some noises when you see this confidence score settings error or warnings. So we will provide option let you to decide whether you still need this confidence score warning or errors. This will coming in the future release and the next is the accepted invoice tabs. So we define three types one is a PO invoice and the second is the header only invoice and the third is the cost invoice. So PO invoice and header. Only invoice are all the invoice which are associated to the purchase order. The difference is the PO invoice will require the review on both the header and the lines in the invoice capture side. The handle only invoice will only require to review the header information and it leaves the system to automatically derive the lines either from the purchase order lines or product recipient lines based on the settings in the FNO side. And the cost invoice is the invoice, which are not associated to the purchase order, and you can decide whether it could be mapped to the vendor invoice or invoice journal. The invoice type will decide the derivation and validation logic and it also will influence the fields control properties. As you can see, we have three tabs to define the 55 filter and in the defined fields sorry and in the fields control actually you can define whether these fields are going to be shown in the review process. You can also control whether the fields is mandatory to be filled or not in the side by side of you. And once you define this configuration group, you can assign this configuration group either to the vendor or to the legal entity or system reference. So the runtime sequence is like that so if the conversion group can be found on the vendor it will use the conversion group on the vendor and if not it will check the settings on the legal end if not then it will use the default one on the system for reference. With such kind of logic actually you can define different configuration groups on different vendors to match your business requirements. So next is about talking about the invoice processing the invoice capture site so as previously a customer can define different channels to receive the invoices and as an autobox we actually provide the direct upload function and it appears in the receiver files. By clicking that and drag and drop the files you can do the direct upload to the invoice and there is limitation that we can only handle 25 in one time upload. Now here is the details how the invoice get processed in the invoice capture site. We actually have two process, one is the touch list, the other is touchless version so once the invoice is getting captured it will do some validation and the derivation logic if the legal entity and vendor accounts is not getting dereps. So you needed to do the classify invoice to determine this legal entity value and vendor accounts value at first. Once it's complete you can also check the invoice type. Normally it will automatically derive the proper settings but if it's incorrect you can correct that and after you confirm this information you can start to review to correct errors and we do have different logic validation logic based on different invoice types and once you complete all the errors you can click the computer review. It will do some further check whether there is still some errors or not. Once it has been ensured there is no additional errors the transfer button gets available for you to click and by clicking that the invoice will immediately transfer to the app and O. As you can see in this process we are calling the synchronized mode to transfer the invoice and for the task list. If there is no error right after invoice get captured and during the transfer, we will leave the invoice to be submitted to additional staging in the FNO sign. And these invoice status stays in the awaiting the frequency. How the invoices are getting processed from the staging the FNO it depends on the processing automation job. So this is the new processing automation job which we introduced in the GA version. This will repeatedly to pull the data from the staging and to process the invoice which sends from the invoice capture. And by default it will execute per hour. And you can set the frequency by your own. Depends if you want to process faster, you can set like on the minute level. As I mentioned earlier actually we provide a nice user interface to help AP clerk to review the invoice. So if we check the layout of this user interface, which we call the side by side view, on the top right side, we have the document header. It contains the status legal entity vendor account and invoice type. And the legal entity vendor account and invoice tab is the key of the invoice. So you needed to make sure these value are correct before you start the review. And in the left side we have a document preview panel and you can zoom in, zoom out or do the rotation. And if you saw this I icon in the invoice header or invoice line panel this I icon will help you to navigate to the place of the contents of the fields value. So it will help you to do the review process more precisely. And later, we actually will improve that to support the additional charges and sales tax in the right side of the side by side view. But the layout won't be changed. And as I mentioned, we are currently supported a lot of languages in the preview model and for the custom model it will support more but the custom auto is still not officially support because we are waiting for the customer model readiness. I will introduce later and you can check whether your language is on the list or not. But I think the phone recognition team will continually to support more languages. So sooner or later the preboot model will cover most of the common language of the invoice. Talking about the roadmap. As we can see, by the end of the July we actually announced GA and the most function you saw was released by the GA version. And we basically will do the monthly or two months official release. And last month we actually has already released some features which I marked as green. And in the next few months we will release some new features. The two big features which will be covered is first as I mentioned, we will support the customer preview model. ing to the past feedback from customer side sometimes they didn't choose our solution because they do have some very complex layout invoices which cannot be handled well by the preview model. And the custom preview model is actually built on the top of the preview model and do some additional enhancements. So the model is owned by the AI builder team which will ga in the coming months. I haven't got the finalized date but it should come in the next one or two months and once it's ga we will do the integration part so you can actually use the customer preview model within our solution. By that time I think you will get more recognition results from the OCR service. And another major feature we are going to support is the financial dimension for the cost invoices. The financial dimension is very key information for the cost invoice because it decides the right person for approved expenditures. In some invoices you actually can capture these financial dimension values directly. So when we support this kind of feature as end to end it will dramatically increase the touchless rate processing for the cost inwards. And this is just in short the feature which we plan in the coming months. I know there are still some additional features which hasn't been mentioned here, for example the creating nodes and the others. So in case you do have ideas or the urgent request, please feel free to reach us. This is the resources I could share with you and one task on going is that I'm preparing some video demo and which will publish externally and to introduce some advanced feature one by one. And for the ones who have joined the YAML group can view this demo already but it's not for the externals. So I will do that and maybe sooner or later you will view the details in somewhere. And here I list the email this daxaphelp@service.microsoft.com. In case you do have any questions regarding about the invoice capture, feel free to write an email or if you have the issues when you use the invoice capture yeah feel free to send an email to us for the support. And regarding the pricing invoice capture, actually the pricing has already been announced in the August version of the Dynamics 365 pricing guides and here I paste the link. Basically, for the Dynamics 365 Finance customer, you will get a 100 invoice capture transaction free to use. Additionally it will cost $300 invoices per tenant per month. Yeah, so you can contact the Microsoft accountant to do the subscription ing to your invoice volume. So that's all for my presentation and we will check the questions in the channels. So there is one question regarding, what is the plan to have other formats after paper invoice? I think I have mentioned that we will support the E invoice in our roadmap and at the beginning of the presentation. Actually we haven't have a concrete research or design on this so this might not come shortly but ing to the downtime roadmap we were targeting that both the paper invoice and the in invoice should be landed in a central place to process by the AP clerk. So it will definitely count if we do have some concrete data we could share in the other channel. Another question is I think Gorgen mentioned, with the invoice capture, is it possible to capture invoice for multiple purchase orders? That's a very good question. Actually for the moment we are supported the multiple purchase order in the current invoice capture already. The reasons behind is that actually the linkage between the invoice and purchase order are on the line level. So if you can correctly enter the purchase order on the line level once you transfer it's actually this invoice are associated to the multiple purchase order but for the moment the experience to select the purchase order or the mapping between the purchase order lines with the invoice lines is not good in the invoice capture. If you check my roadmap carefully actually we have one task to improve this experience. So once the feature is ready you will see that you can easily select multiple purchase order and do the correct mapping so that will come also in our roadmap. Are there any solutions for QR code scanning coming on the invoice images with the land localization? Yeah that's also a very nice question. So for QR code scanning I know this is required for some countries invoice specifically and for the moment we haven't have a plan for cover the QR codes. First reason is that we do have other higher priority in hands, but meanwhile we also like to collect more feedback whether the other nation also have such similar cases using the QR codes scanning. So yeah if we can get some commercial requirement on that we can definitely put it in our roadmap Mark mentioned, will the app be extendable in the future for more advanced customizations? That's exactly what we plan. So for the first stage what we are offering is that we would provide a very fundamental function working smoothly and the next step when the order function basic function is there we would consider about the letter customer or partner to do extension. For instance introduce own customer fields in the invoice capture side and let the customer model to automatically capture this information and persist in the invoice capture side. Meanwhile in the FNO we will provide some mapping between the invoice capture fields to FNO field so it will last the end scenario working for supporting the additional custom fields. If you have somewhat like an idea what kind of specific function needed to be extended yeah okay go also mentioned another question regarding about the AI builder license. So the question is if a customer has the AI builder license, can they be transformed to invoice capture an add-ons? So actually in our solution we have own license. So if you want to use the AI builder license, you actually need to build your own flow and calling the AI builder model and this will lost the capability such as the derivation and validation logic and also you will lost the side by side of yours which we introduced in the invoice capture. If you build on your solution, it will consume the AI builder credits. If you are using our invoice capture, we have own license. There is another question asking, does this allow invoice processing before receipts have been posted? Or can the invoice be integrated as the invoice register journal for cases when receipts have not happened yet? Okay, if I understand it correctly, this is a common ask for the European invoicing process. What you need is that you need to have the invoice to be registered at first then create depending when they invoice and wait for the product receipts. And actually this process is the FNO version, and we currently haven't make the integration with the invoice capture because we need more feedback whether this invoice register process is working perfectly in the FNO side or not. As this feature was just released in 10.0.37. The last release. I think it released not yet GA. So once it's GA, you can have a try with this feature. If you do have any comments, let us know and once it's stable, we will do the integration with the invoice capture to make this process as end to end. There is a question from Hammond. Is the free charge somehow limited (time and functionality)? Okay, free trial, as I mentioned, this stands for that for Dynamics. 365 Finance customer, You do have one invoice to be tried within your environment. So once you actually have this 100 amount free trial so for testing, I think it will be sufficient to do that. Once it's exit, then you needed to do additional subscription which costs $300 per the invoices per tenant per month. So I think due to the time I will close, I will hand over to Kevin for the ending words. Thank you Rayne. We'll look through the questions and consolidate any of the trends or items that make sense. We'll publish to the FAQ page as well related to the invoice capture. So we'll continue to go through the questions that were submitted and aggregate some answers. There again want to say thank you for attending today's TechTalk. Have a great day. Thank you everyone.