ABBYY FlexiCapture for Invoices

Watch our video in order to learn how to teach the ABBYY FlexiCapture for Invoices software where fields are located just by pointing and clicking.

Hello, today I’d like to show you our operator or accountant based training.

Now what this means is that as an accountant or as an operator of the system teaches the software where fields are at, the software will then remember and apply those changes the next time it sees a vendors invoice. We sometimes refer to this as machine learning because we’re actually teaching the software and then the software is going to learn and then adapt as we’re processing additional invoices for a specific vendor.

So what you see in front of me is what we call the verification station. That’s the station here in the foreground. And in the background we have a project set up station. What I want to show you is how the software is taught.

First thing, what we do is we open up our verification station and we simply just tell the software where things are at that it didn’t find. So for example, it didn’t find the invoice number, so I’m going to train it and point and click. And then for the invoice date I’m going to teach it where the invoice date was found.

Now that I’ve done that, the software is going to remember that for this vendor and then next time we see a vendor called Custom Kitchens of Bay Shore, the software is going to recall where I taught it and apply that training and therefore I will not have to teach it any longer where invoice number or invoice date are located.

So what I’m going to do is simply point and click. I’m going to hit our close task button and this is just a screen that asks us if we want to confirm anything else on the document. I’m going to hit no. Now what’s happening behind the scenes is the software’s grabbing that document and remembering that that’s one that we need to use so that it can be taught where these are at. And what it does is it creates a field extraction training batch.

Now this is the Admin side where we call the project set up station and you can see on a menu we have field extraction training batches. These batches is what the software then uses to train and keep track of its training as we’re teaching it on the fly or as our accounts, or AP people, are teaching the software.

So you can see it actually creates this field extraction training batch for the vendor and then we can see here that our specific invoice that we were training is found here.

Once it gets a certain level of confidence as software locks in that training so that the next time we see this vendor’s invoice, no matter if the data is different, it will remember where we pointed and clicked and apply that training.

Now it’s much more intelligent than of course just remembering the rectangle of where we pointed and clicked. It’s remembering a lot more. For example, where I pointed and clicked in reference to other details on the document. Maybe in reference to where their line items start or where the vendor’s information is located on the documents.

So this is an example of our operator or accountant based training and how the software does it. It is all on the fly. The AP person or the accountant never knows that the software is actually learning as we teach it. So it’s not a big IT resource, it doesn’t require a consultant. It’s simply what we refer to as training on the fly and we allow our end users to do that for us, once again, minimizing any IT resources or system admin functions that are required up front. So this is a great way to understand how the software is learning and adapting to different styles of documents.

I hope you enjoyed this video. If we can help you with anything else, please reach out to us. Thank you so much.

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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.

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Watch our video to learn how to create a custom field for an invoice document definition (template) in ABBYY FlexiCapture.

Hello, today I’d like to show you how to add a custom field to an invoice document definition or sometimes what we call a template. I want to show you an example of why we would do that. Say, for instance, I have this invoice sample on my screen, and at the bottom of our documents, and this is a very basic example, but maybe at the bottom, we have this document ID that I do wanna capture for every single document or invoice that comes in. It’s a very, very simple process to add one. We just gotta know a little bit about the steps.

Now the very first step that we need to do is we need to create a FlexiLayout, and FlexiLayout tells us the textual rules of a document. That’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna start a brand new FlexiLayout using the FlexiLayout Studio. What we’re gonna do is create a new one. In the new one, we are going to give it an intelligent name. Maybe we’ll say this is our Invoice Number. So then we will save this layout. The software’s gonna create it. We wanna make sure that we follow the next steps very, very, very importantly.

The first step is we wanna allow multiple pages, and we wanna allow that 1 to INF, infinite number of pages or infinity there. Next, we will add a sample that possibly just shows the software where it’s at, so we can use this to test with. So I’m gonna load a sample. I’m going to disable the header and footer. Those are right there, and we wanna disable these. Now the way we disable them is just right clicking and disable, and right click and disable.

In this simple case, I’m going to add a labeled field to extract the document ID here at the bottom. So we’re gonna add an element, and a label field, for document ID. Next thing I will do is just match it, and we’ll just make sure here that we have the document ID as a label and then the field there to the right. Next we’ll add our blocks, so we can return this back to the product. Then we will save.

Now this is a very basic example of how to add fields. Adding fields in an invoices layout can be done either generically, which means it will happen for every single invoice, or we can do one for vendor-specific layouts. That’s not what we’re doing. We’re not doing the latter; we’re doing the first one. We’re showing how we do it generically. So what I’m gonna do is save this, and then I’m gonna export this project. We’re gonna export the layout here.

Then I’m going to go into my document definitions, and I’m just gonna duplicate one to show this to you. What I would like to do is go to our properties, and we will go to our FlexiLayout tab, and we will load a new one. We wanna find the path of that AFL that we exported. Since I told it to keep the custom field, you can see my document ID now is created over here at the right. I will close this, and I will save it. Once we publish it, we’ll create a new batch, and we’ll load that sample in just so I can show you now that the software’s not only extracting the other invoice details, but it’s extracting that document number as well.

If we scroll down to the bottom, you can see now we’re extracting the document ID. We would do that now on every single document that we extract. So that’s a very, very simple example of how we create a generic layout that will be in place for every single invoice that we process through the system. You can see with all the flexibility of both the FlexiLayout Studio and the FlexiCapture application, we can pretty much customize the solution to do what we would like.

I hope you enjoyed this video. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us on our website, and we look forward to working with you. Thank you so much.

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Watch a video from ABBYY to see how easy ABBYY FlexiCapture for Invoices extracts data from reams of invoices while doing the 2-way match and then exporting to your accounting system.

When competition is tough. It forces companies to respond quickly to new challenges and maximize the efficiency of each business process. To achieve all this, many companies have implemented accounts payable automation and while evaluating their solutions, they’ve discovered many extra benefits. Let’s look at the challenges you face when it comes to AP processes and how you can maximize the efficiency of your AP department with ABBYY FlexiCapture for Invoices. Companies receive invoices in many forms and format and for organizations having multiple business units and subsidiaries control over the invoices flow may create additional challenges. On their way to the AP department invoices may get lost or delayed and you might not be sure at what time the invoice will reach your AP staff. But with ABBYY FlexiCapture for Invoices, all incoming invoices are captured right at the point of their arrival, independent of their form or format, then digitized and routed for centralized processing.

So no invoices are delayed or lost and there are no additional costs for document delivery or hand-to-hand transfer. Now you can be sure that each invoice gets to your AP staff in the shortest possible time and you enjoy visibility and control over your invoice flow. As soon as an invoice arrives at your AP department, a number of manual operations are routinely performed including checking its information, comparing it with the audit, getting approval, and keying its data into your financial solution. These traditional manual approaches to invoice processing are slow, time consuming and inefficient. So imagine how your company would benefit by minimizing the time and costs of such tasks and now imagine achieving it with ease with FlexiCapture. As soon as a document is digitized, ABBYY FlexiCapture recognizes it and transforms the image into highly accurate electronic data, so there is no need to manually rekey information anymore.

FlexiCapture identifies the country of the company being invoiced and checks each document for compliance with local regulations, the company’s business rules and master databases. Now you’re free from having to go through such checks manually since you can rely on ABBYY FlexiCapture’s accuracy. The solution also performs automatic purchase order matching. Comparing the values in the order with those on the invoice matched invoices automatically approved and routine for posting. In those cases where matching is unclear, the accountant can view the order, compare the values and accept the invoice. Plus you’ll save even more time by leveraging the solutions intelligent document routing. Based on the results of multilevel checks, each invoice is assigned to status and moved to the next appropriate step. Valid- Approved for further posting of payment Exception- Sent to your accountant because of missing information. Rejected- For return to your supplier.

Did you ever imagine that invoices could be processed without human intervention and that your accountants could be free to focus on documents requiring their specific attention for more efficient review and correction of documents? ABBYY FlexiCapture for Invoices guides users through fields with uncertainties provides a description of any problems and suggest values from the recognition cash. And in case a vendor was not clearly identified, ABBYY FlexiCapture suggests the likely best matches from your ERP database. FlexiCapture can also be trained to locate necessary data on an image. This intelligent training is completely under your control. Now your invoices are converted into digital data ready that is verified, 100% accurate and ready for posting and payment. What’s next? Whether you’re using a special invoice approval workflow application or leveraging the built in functionality of your ECM or ERP system, FlexiCapture accurately delivers invoice images and data to the workflow.

You can be sure that all employees involved in invoice approval have access to the information needed for fast and efficient decision-making. FlexiCapture ensures fast and seamless integration with SAP, Microsoft dynamics, Oracle, or any other financial application your company uses invoice images turned into electronic format of your choice and attributed with recognized data are transferred to your ECM system for long term storage and payment. Now you are always prepared for audits and inquiries and able to easily locate and retrieve any document at any time. So would you like to get in control of your incoming invoice flow, increase visibility over your invoice handling, reduce invoice processing cycles, make payments on time, and improve control over your cashflow, reduce operational costs, be prepared for audits and inquiries and transform your accounts payable department into a model of efficiency.

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