Watch our video to learn the basics of getting started with your first ABBYY FlexiCapture for Invoices project.
Hello. Today, I’m going to show you how to create your very first ABBYY FlexiCapture for invoices project.
Now, creating this style of project for invoice automation is a little bit different than what we do for typical forms processing with fixed and unstructured forms. Of course, invoices are unstructured or semi-structured by nature, but ABBYY has built some intelligence into their tools, specifically for invoice automation that allow us to have a little bit more control over how documents are processed. That’s why this is a special start-up video for this specific opportunity.
What we’re going to do is go to a file, create a new project and right from the top, this is where it gets very important. What we’re going to do is name the project something intelligent, and then we want to select the project type. Now, you can see that there are multiple different project types that are kind of tweaked or specific to maybe the surrounding country or the base country. For this case, we’re going to do the US, because that’s where we’re located. You may decide, if you’re dealing with a European customer or a Canadian customer, and use that as the base product even if they’re operating globally; you kind of want their home base to be the one that we’re selecting here.
We’re going to create the project, and the software will go through a process of creating some of that deep, internal intelligence so that we have it ready for us out of the box. When it’s done, we can hit the “close” button. Now, we have our first FlexiCapture for invoices solution ready for us. What we’re going to do is go look at our project and document definitions, and you’ll see that when we created the invoices project from scratch, it now has a brand new document definition already created for us for invoice processing. We can edit that, and we can look at some of the specific features related to invoices processing. Once again, this is different than what happens when we create any other project from scratch.
I’m going to hit “Edit”, and right off the bat, you will see that ABBYY has created many, many different fields here. Probably in the hundred of different fields that you can control and have out of the box for your recognition. You do not have to use all of these fields, and of course, through time, you can add your own fields and reference those through ABBYY’s FlexiCapture FlexiLayout studio.
So, these are the fields. A lot of these are out of the box. Like I said, you can turn them on, turn them off or tweak some settings there. The real important, nitty-gritty concept of invoice automation comes down to our properties. This is where we get very specific. We have data sets within the solution, and data sets are sometimes what we call “master data”. So they’re linked back to our client’s ERP system or accounting system, business system maybe. These provide us opportunities to find, and in the invoice automation world; things like vendors or purchase orders, GL codes, business units, the other items that you see there on the screen. Data sets are key to invoice recognition. They give us the ability to use our internal master data, whether it be vendors or purchase orders, and we use that data to find information on the document. It also gives us the ability to validate against that data as well, and this is the very first step, or one of the very first steps that we will go through when we set up a brand-new project for a client.
We need to have the master data, and master data needs to be clean and it needs to be specific. We can provide some surrounding detail around that if you contact us for more information. But data sets are very important to the concept, the overall concept of invoice automation. The other things I will show you that are specific to our invoice projects are the invoice settings. We have different keywords that we can reference within the product. You see here, I have English, and I can, of course, modify what we call “keywords” or kind of how the software by default finds some of these fields that we have marked here.
We can also, of course, add and control different languages here within the product. There are other features that are very important for us to note, that out of the box are disabled, but we can enable them with just a point of a checkbox here. We can enable “Purchase Order Matching”. It’s very, very common. In fact, almost all of our invoice automation customers want to find line items. This is when you really want to make sure that you add this feature into your project, otherwise the software is just going to look for invoice header and footer information.
I’ll just scroll through here so you can see some of the other details. It’s also very common that there would be some sort of expense account coding or general ledger coding involved in a project as well. So, invoice features are very common that we want to tweak as well. This is the start of an invoice automation project. There are many, many levels of customization here. Every one of our clients is different and has different expectations and different use cases of the invoice automation project, but the neat part about the solution is that ABBYY gives us the ability through some of their default fields and also the advanced technology that they’ve built in to really control the solution. This is just a get-it-started video. The solution goes way deeper, and very, very flexible. It can definitely meet the needs of our clients and of you if you’re looking for invoice automation.
So, if you are looking for some assistance here, please reach out to us. We would love to help you any way that we can and to learn more about our experience with invoice automation. Thank you so much.