Write an Invoice for Teams Easily and Efficiently

Write an invoice for teams

good morning or afternoon everyone thank you so much for joining us today today we're going to be looking at automating ap accounts payable invoices using office 365 and teams i have a couple minutes um actually about one more minute till atop the hour ing to my watch so i'll give everyone another minute here to go ahead and come into the webinar okay all right um it looks like ing to my watch we're right at the top of the hour so we'll go ahead and get started again thank you everyone so much for joining us today it's going to be a brief meeting half hour here just looking at automating ap invoices using office 365 and teams a few housekeeping things i will do my best to monitor the questions so if you want to go ahead and put a question in there as we're going through i will try to keep my eye on that and then if there's a break i'll go ahead and pause and address any questions as we're going through this again my name is mike i work for dynamic point i'm the director of business development and today we'll be going over invoice automation using office 365 and teams for sake of full disclosure we will be showing um our product here that is a office 365 app that you could add to the mix but even if you don't plan to use our product hopefully you'll still leave with some tips and tricks and some knowledge of how you could use office 365 just to support ap processing and invoice automation so let's go ahead and get it going looks like we are set everyone's on the call and i'm gonna go ahead and advance the slide here so just a quick introduction of who dynamic point is so dynamic point um our claim to fame or or what we do here is we create apps on top of office 365. and for those of you who are not familiar with this concept um the best analogy that i've sort of been able to come up with to explain it is it's very similar to an app that resides on your mobile phone i'm sure we've all installed apps on our mobile phone and when we do it asks us all these questions can i use your you know camera your location and all these things that we probably don't read and we just you know select yes to but that is the app leveraging this platform that is provided by either your iphone or your android device and microsoft provides this whole framework for products and app development companies like us within an office 365 ecosystem so that's exactly what we do is we build apps within this framework that most of our customers already own so we get to leverage all of this product functionality that i'll talk about in the next slide here in conjunction with our products to make them more flexible we are created in 2009 which if those of you have followed office 365 it was not around it was its predecessor dpos back in the day and we used to create products on top of sharepoint and then about six years or so ago with the you know gain and steam and the adoption of office 365 began moving all of our products to that new framework so that's just a little history on us as far as our product lineup we have a portal product and we have an expense management we're going to skip those today and the focus today is on this guy right here and this is our invoice automation product again leveraging this office 365 framework today we're focusing on the team's integration as well and really the process that we are trying to accommodate is everything that happens before this invoice is created in your erp or your accounting system so that's like the end game if you will but before that invoice gets in there generally speaking of course it has to be received so it's going to come in from a vendor we're going to maybe apply some workflow to this and some approval processes we could use ocr or optical character recognition to extrapolate data from this invoice such that we don't have to type it in there's the whole ap management component of that and what i mean by that is whether or not i'm doing a po match or just assigning account elements to this it's a non-po invoice coming in and then ultimately it is ready for integration so all of these steps would have occurred before i could put this invoice into my accounting system for payment and posting obviously so that is the breadth of what our application is focused on as well as how we're leveraging office 365 to manage this process so the suite of products right and you know all of these apps if you will are coming with office 365 subscription and i say that a little bit in air quotes because there's many different ways to license office 365 but most all of them um include a whole suite of products of which i'll cover today and what we are doing is our app is really being added to this mix and being installed on top of sharepoint so this ecosystem gives us the ability to add apps to sharepoint which you could you know download from the app store or just upload directly to your sharepoint tenant and sharepoint is providing this framework for the product it's really the user interface it's where the data is being stored for today we're talking about ap invoices those are going to be stored in sharepoint in document libraries and things of that nature so it's really secure in your tenant with office 365. you know the data is not being stored anywhere in our cloud or anything of that nature it is with office 365 and specifically with your tenant with microsoft workflow is really important to the ap automation product process right i have an invoice that comes in i maybe want to automate and apply some rpa to this or maybe i want to round it to individuals such that they could review this invoice and you know approve or reject it so for that microsoft gives us this tool by the name of power automate it is a framework for workflow that is extremely powerful i could probably spend days just talking about the options on it but today we are going to focus on how it's being used with the ap automation process to route invoices to the appropriate people for review and approval so when it comes to gathering the data for invoice submission probably the more common thing that we see is that emails are i'm sorry the invoices are being submitted via email vendors are just emailing them and by all means we can most certainly support that but what i'll introduce to you today is the use of some other methods including powerapps including forms including teams obviously teams is our focus today which is very integrated with sharepoint as well as the rest of these suite of products so we'll be looking at that as well on different ways i could submit these invoices and then when it comes to reporting and analytics microsoft provides their go to reporting tool by the name of power bi all of this data is again being stored in my tenant so i could use this tool to begin reporting on this information and looking at outstanding invoices and doing analysis on this process okay so let's talk about the steps generally speaking from an ap automation perspective and generally speaking there's you know three simple steps if you will and this first step is i need to get the invoice right it's going to come in from a vendor of course because we're talking about ap automation.ar so i need to receive this invoice from the vendor and you know like i said probably the one that wins the most amount of votes in my experience is email it's easy right i have a shared inbox and a vendor could just submit that invoice via a shared inbox you know at you know accounting dynamicpoint.com or something of that nature accounts payable but there's most certainly all kinds of different methods that i could do this i could use powerapps if i have my employees submitting the invoices maybe i want to do an a mobile upload or if i have contractors in the field that are submitting the um invoices i could do that i could do a portal entry i could scan it and all of these other different methods which honestly i could take credit for inventing none of them they all are leveraging out of the box office 365 functionality in conjunction with a sharepoint library and this library is serving as our central repository for all these invoices coming in so they're no longer being buried in email i can now see them receive them and begin taking action on gathering data routing to the appropriate people etc and i'll show as part of my demo a lot of these different options of how i could use these office 365 technologies again including teams here and we'll go ahead and do an upload from teams to get those invoices into the system and really the method is going to be driven by your business process and your relationship with your vendors right if i am working with contractors getting them to do you know a mobile upload or maybe a portal entry could be very applicable because i have that type of influence over those contractors if i you know my vendor is i don't know home depot for sake of argument they're not going to do any of that for me right like i don't have that influence over them um they're going to give me their invoice however they want to and i really can't influence that submission method okay so after we get the invoice then we begin step two here which is the processing of this invoice and this includes using ocr to extrapolate data it includes the workflow component and includes the use of our app that gives us the integration with the accounting elements whether this be vendors or pos or accounts etc such that we could begin coding this invoice and processing it and putting it to the right gl accounts or doing po matching to get it ready for the third and final step which is bringing that into the accounting system okay enough of my scribbling and talking let's go ahead and start looking at this all right so here i have um a demo site and this site happens to be integrated with microsoft business central but we do have if you look at our integration page on our website we do have integrations with all kinds of different erp products and um the layout of this i mean i guess first of all to introduce this this is just a sharepoint site right which those of you are familiar with office 365 are probably recognizing that the only thing quote unquote special about this is i happen to have our app deployed so if i were to go to the site contents here you would see that i've added our app to this site otherwise it's just a normal sharepoint site and i've laid it out basically using those steps that i just introduced incoming invoices is that library it's serving as basically the queue of receiving all these invoices from vendors i have my processing queue that represents those that are within the workflow and then i have a link just to my erp application in this case business central to show those that have already integrated we talk about the power of bi power bi and power bi is something that i could build all these reports um and i could absolutely start using this um to share information or provide metrics of where invoices are in this approval process and i saw a quick question come through um is this being recording the answers absolutely and you will all receive a recording of this as well so don't worry about taking i guess too much notes or anything i'll go ahead and send the recording to everyone after the call okay so we talked about the layout we talked about the presentation let's talk about the users who cares about invoices and again that's going to vary a little bit about your process probably the more common people is accounts payable because they're managing this whole process but maybe you know i want to bring managers into this or other people that i want to invite into this dashboard to have visibility to where these invoices are in the review process okay so let's start with this step one incoming invoices and um lo and behold you know we were talking about teams and i have a teams site here and if you guys are familiar with team sites they are highly highly highly integrated with sharepoint right by creating a team site i basically create a sharepoint site and let's say i want to submit an invoice that i receive from the vendor and employees doing this or if i'm inviting vendors to do this like i said is is really depending on your business process maybe your vendors would never do this and we just want to stick with email or maybe i have a very distributed buying environment where the invoices are going to employees and i want them to upload them to this library so i'm going to do that i'm going to click this simple upload here and i am going to pick an invoice let's go ahead and pick one more two just to get a couple going okay you can't see it but it did open up a little pop-up and what we will see here is if i refresh my screen that of course i've just uploaded two invoices to this library and you know if i were to go over to sharepoint and refresh you would see those same invoices here too again teams is highly integrated with sharepoint so great right like who cares i've uploaded them you know big deal right the more interesting thing is what's going on in the background is now we have um kicked off a workflow and what this workflow is doing is saying all of these invoices that come into this library and i actually have the flow up here if you guys are familiar with power automate so i say when this file is created we want it to upload it to an ocr process and i am using a cloud-based ocr tool that extrapolates the data from invoices i'm the one that we're using is by the name of verify but what it is doing is getting the data off of those invoices and if you notice they're now gone i'm going to upload one more just so i can see it really quick and sort of take a pause here to show you but what it is doing is it's extrapolating data from these invoices that maybe otherwise i would have needed to manually type in so i now have a new one in the system and what we will see is this workflow here again if i go look at this you could say it's running in the background and you can see here's my runs that are going on but it is being submitted to this ocr process and then when it's done well it's going so fast i'm sorry i'm not talking too much but what you'll see is it writes the data that was captured by this ocr process right back to this library and then after it captures this data we bring it into our app so it's just really here for a brief moment and what this is serving as is basically a dropbox for all the invoices coming into the system so maybe i could catch it this time but what you'll see is if i sit here and refresh like a madman that all of the data from this invoice is being captured and written to these columns and maybe this time it'll take too long since i'm actually waiting on it it usually happens in a brief minute or two but if you understand this concept what i'm going to show you next is all of these different ways that i use to get this okay got it right so you see all of the data that ocr was able to recognize and write that immediately back to the library and boom it's gone right so no one's really hanging out here waiting for this to happen i'm just showing you how this works so let's start using our imagination right i uploaded that from teams but maybe as opposed to using teams you know i have more of a mobile process or the need to submit these from a mobile device and i happen to have my phone open here and this is leveraging the onedrive app again another microsoft tool here and sure enough i have that same invoice library and let's just go ahead and take a picture so i happen to have an invoice sitting here on my desk lo and behold and we'll go ahead and take a picture of this using this onedrive app as you can see this onedrive app is sort of cool it just doesn't take a picture it cleans it up it calls it a scan right so like um i could adjust it and everything but you can see here that it's actually getting rid of my desk and everything else and if i go ahead and hit done here it's going to give me the ability to enter some metadata i'm going to say forget it because i'm going to allow the ocr process to get all that information for me but if i go ahead and refresh of course where do you think that scan went went right into this library so again we're going to see ocr kick off on this and i'm not going to take you through the pain of mere refreshing but you'll see all of the data be extrapolated from this invoice and written to this library so everything i've shown you so far none of it is really involving you know dynamic points product this is just all office 365 functionality you know working with this ecosystem of tools they provided so i have uploaded one i've taken a picture of one from my phone let's talk about you know old faithful the idea that my vendors are going to email this to me so i have this ap at dynamicpoint.com i have an email here of course on my email i am submitting an invoice because it would sort of not be fun without that so here's my invoice and i want to go ahead again and submit or send this and you've probably figured out that this is going to again go into this library but now it is being received from an external email and being routed to this library so not to be at a dead horse but there's even more options right so if i say here and refresh or you guys could just trust me that this will briefly take us out there it is okay so that's the one i just submitted via email and i should probably figure it out it's going to be going to an ocr process to extrapolate data and into our app okay so let's just talk about a couple others um again depending on your process if i wanted a form right generally what we call it is the check request where internal employees or external users can submit these same invoices if you're familiar with microsoft forms forms has the ability to save the content of the form to sharepoint right so let me do that so if i fill out this form here and just put in some key data it's going to ask me for an upload of my invoice but as opposed to just sending an email i could require some fields so maybe you're tracking projects or something like that and i want to go ahead and require them to submit this as part of the submission process so i could capture some additional detail here i'm going to go ahead and upload my invoice skip the comments and hit submit that was a form as you probably figured out it's going to go into that same space into that library if i want to do that from a website form i can most certainly do that from a website form as well so this is the same idea just a little bit prettier because it's integrated with our website okay so enough of that let's talk let's move forward so now that we've submitted this in you know a plethora of different options let's talk about where these invoices are going where these invoices are going is into a processing queue we've received them we've got all kinds of data metadata from the invoice and now they're in this queue and you can see you know i have a ton here that are all auto created taking the results of the ocr process and bringing them into our app and the reason we bring them into our app is now we have this ability to start assigning whether it be po matches right so this happened to be for a po invoice or non-po where so these are all po let's see if i have non-po i don't know all mine are pl ones um but i could create one really quick and i'll add an allocation item which means as opposed to being matched to a po we're going to go ahead and assign things like expense types to this or maybe other things such as like dimensions and we'll go ahead and save this so depending on how these invoices are coming here they're either being matched to pos or i'm putting gl accounts associated to them and they're all coming into this workbench if you will our dashboard that now i have a place to manage them to perform validation to match the pos to also check against erp data so you can see here i'm actually getting a warning message saying that this met this invoice has already been received and the reason it's already been received is i use that invoice quite often for demos so i'm just going to go ahead and change the date here and update it and you'll note that it's going to re-query the erp in this case business central and say okay this is now a valid invoice it's no longer a duplicate my error message is gone all right so now that i have them all coming into this dashboard right this was all automatic this is where accounts payable is going to live i could submit it and what submitting it is going to do is call again this workflow so again we're leveraging power automate it's going to kick off an approval process that is going to submit this for reveal and as advertised you know where does teams come into play i submitted it via teams i could also review and approve it via teams so what we'll see is i'm going to get a notification in fact i'll open up my email too so we could see that aspect as well but this notification is going to be generated from power automate so you can see here i just got a notification and i can click on it here obviously but what i should also see coming into my email is a new invoice ready to review and approve so let's start with the email and then we'll go look at the other views or other ways i should say to manage this task right so here's the first and foremost one i got an email and included that invoice it's included some of the data that i was able to extrapolate this again is using this power automate approval associated to it and i can approve or reject it or i could edit it if my reviewers are part of this review pro or assignment process i should say they could also edit it but let's go look at this from teams too so i'm going to go ahead and get rid of my email for a sec and open up teams hopefully there it is found it too much stuff i apologize and got it what you can see here is i also um have a feed coming in for my activity feed here saying i have a new invoice ready to review and approve so if you want to look at it at teams it's very similar to the email i could obviously look at the attachment i could approve or reject it or i could edit it or there is also an approval app that you could add to teams too that's part of this power automate framework and it's just a little bit different view it's obviously it's similar to the activity feed but it's as opposed to being jumbled up with the other things that come in the activity feed i see all of the workflow items separately here in the approval and last but not least as you probably figured microsoft does have an app for this so if i were to again bring over my phone here and sure enough i have the power automate app installed you can see here is you know again all my invoices that are ready to review and approve um i could click on any of these and approve or reject them as well as look at the invoice all right so let's go ahead and go back to the email and say hey this looks good or and carry it forth in the workflow so the workflow continues to run you see here i did get a notification that it has been approved so that's great right and the workflow will continue to run and as this workflow runs if i refresh my screen here we'll see this invoice gets updated in our dashboard right so the workflow is being assigned to approvers and different people in the field you can see it actually dropped out of my view that's because i have a filter here but if i clear that filter what you will see is that the audit log is being populated with each of these steps in the workflow who to get submitted to what was their action taken so it went to my dynamic point demo account and they approved it and then this actually represent the last step in the workflow so the workflow in this case was only a one period approval and then after that approval it integrated directly with my erp system of which i could show you here in a second as well and then you know all of the notes that were captured as part of the review are also being listed in this note section so that was my this looks good and the user who took action on this was the dynamic point demo so if we want to follow this guy all the way through if i look at my erp details here you'll see this is the transaction that just got created and it gets created in real time and it leverages what are called web services to call that integration immediately so if i were to go here and just go to my purchase invoice oops sorry i fingered that i don't want purchase orders i want purchase invoice and purchase invoices that looks better and what we'll see is an invoice that has been created with all of the details as well as the invoice attachment has been passed to it as well so go down to the very bottom here because that's my latest and greatest here's my invoice the gl account items have been assigned and if i look here there's the attachment so after it was finally approved it did call those web services and integrate it in real time so just to recap the steps that we covered we went through the receipt and the different ways i get to use office 365 we went to the processing the different ways i get to use office 365 from an approval perspective and last but not least it brought in into the accounting system ready to be posted and paid so those are the steps we're taking you through again the hope of all this right is that we are leveraging what you own and it is a framework that is you know more flexible and more robust than you know anything that we could have developed on our own um our customers already own it so we don't have to of course charge them for that because they're already using office 365 and what we are doing is if you look at the various components that we covered today the erp integration the invoice repository the workflow we're really just focused on that one part of the pie and the rest of it is being provided by office 365. one more question it looks like just came in uh is the attachment business central link back actually it is configurable we could either pass the attachment or provide a drill back um there is a configuration option to either pass that url as a link so you could drill back to it which is stored obviously in sharepoint or sometimes people want the actual attachment included in the erp in my case it actually passed it as an attachment but that's not required we could just pass the url as well and it looks like ing to my watch we're right on time here so i want to again thank you everyone for joining here's some more information uh on dynamic points um a lot of information on on our website as well as here's my personal email in marcin dynamicpoint.com i will be following up everyone to include this recording i can't thank you enough for your time today everyone have a great holiday season and again i appreciate your focus and dedication you had and given me a half hour of your time take care and thanks again