Using Kofax’s OCR Service to Process Payables Invoices in D365 Business Central

Posted by Steve Chapman

Dynamics 365 Business Central (BC) includes functionality to accept payables invoice information from an optical character recognition (OCR) processing service and easily turn it into Payables Invoices in BC. Kofax, a leading supplier of intelligent automation software for digital workflow transformation, offers an OCR processing service with a direct link to BC that’s ready to go.  The service is called ReadSoft Online.

The basic process is:

• The vendor sends an invoice attachment via email to a specific email address related to your account at Kofax.
• Kofax scans the invoice attachment using OCR technology, determining key fields such as the invoice number, vendor, invoice date and line item detail.
• Kofax sends the invoice information to your D365 BC instance.
• D365 BC maintains a queue that receives the information and makes the transaction available in the Incoming Documents screen
• In the Incoming Documents screen, the invoice information can be used to create a Payables Invoice. The invoice can be processed as usual from that point.

You also can add an automated approval process to have the invoice information reviewed before it is turned into a Payables Invoice.

There may be some “training” that needs to be completed to help the OCR system correctly interpret the information received for specific vendor invoice formats. This is easily accomplished within D365 BC. You make a correction to the OCR results and then just click a button to send the corrections back to the OCR system.

The Payables Invoice in BC will automatically have the original invoice document attached as an image.

This is an example of the ReadSoft Online interface:

The Incoming Document screen shows documents that are ready to be transferred to transactions in D365 BC:

Here is a video that shows this in action:

Discover more helpful insights for the Microsoft Dynamics platform, including D365 Business Central, throughout Armanino’s Dynamics blog. Or connect with Armanino’s D365 BC team to learn more.