AP Automation for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations: Readsoft & Exflow (Video)

Discover how SK Global can help your organization increase efficiency and financial control while lowering costs. Built into Dynamics AX and Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, SK Global’s AP Automation solution streamlines the entire invoicing process in one centralized environment. Watch this recorded webinar for an overview of SK Global’s OCR, 2-3 way matching and approver routing solution, Readsoft and ExFlow.

Transcript below:

Melissa: Hi there, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. This is Melissa from Encore Business Solutions. And today from SK Global, we’ve got Tina Ash and Kelly Kosinski. So, hi, both of you, and welcome. Thanks for joining us.

Kelly: Hi, everyone. And thank you to the Encore team for inviting us here today.

Melissa: No problem, feel free to take it away.

Kelly: Okay, well, I’ll start off with an introduction. My name is Kelly Kosinski. I’m part of our sales and marketing team here at SK Global. A little bit about SK Global, we are certified and preferred ISP by Microsoft. And we’ve been focused in the dynamics channel for nearly 30 years. Our success has been in providing banking, Treasury, and payment automation solutions. Tina’s presentation today will be a high-level presentation of our invent AP automation solution for your enjoyment. If you’re interested in seeing any of our other automation products, we host weekly demos and you can sign up at any time at sksoft.com/demo. All right, Tina, I’ll hand it over to you now.

Tina: Sure. Thank you. I’m sorry, I don’t see the screen sharing option yet. All right, I think I got distracted by the dog.

Melissa: Sorry, I have a puppy and there’s a storm here. He’s never heard a thunderstorm before, I think. So, he’s a little scared.

Tina: Looks good. So as Kelly said, we’re going to go over-exploit today at a very high level. So we’re not gonna show all of the functionality there. We’re just gonna show some of the highlights. My name is Tina Ash, and I am a Solution Architect with SK Global. So we’ll start with one slide, and this is going to be the process or the solution at a high level. So today you are receiving invoices in some manner. We see most people are receiving those via email through regular mail. Some not as common but we also do have some people that are having like electronic or EDI invoices. The OCR, which we’ll see in just a second, it is going to capture that invoice image and convert it into data. And then the invoice data will be sent as an XML and the invoice is a PDF into ExFlow and D365. ExFlow is fully integrated with the purchasing module, inventory and logistics, accounts payable, finance, project accounting, and fixed assets.

So any of those sub-modules that you’re using as part of your D365 implementation, you can also use through ExFlow. If it is a purchase invoice and it matches all the criteria and is within tolerances, it can go straight through to accounts payable for payment processing. So now we’re going to look at the OCR. So the OCR we’re looking at is ExFlow data capture. A couple of things about ExFlow DC, it is an automated tool. And there is a template per country that determines what information is needed for your business for that country. So, for example, in the U.S., our vendors, generally speaking anyway, they’re not required to put tax registration or tax ID numbers on an invoice. But in Europe and Latin America, a lot of times that is a requirement to process those invoices. So we could say for our U.S. entities, this is not a requirement, but for these other entities, it is. The templates are easy to maintain. So you can have things added or removed as you need for your business.

And what happens is each time an invoice comes into ExFlow DC, it’s going to create a vendor templates specific to that vendor, we’ll call the vendor fingerprint. And you do have the ability to determine if you wanna capture Invoice header or Invoice header and invoice lines. Now for purposes of demo today, I have disabled some of the automation in my system. Not every invoice should be stopping in this verify step. We’re going to be looking at one today. But I do have my invoice stopping here because otherwise, we’d be looking at an invoice that’s already in D365. So the step by step really should be dealing with your exceptions. So your exceptions in your data capture are going to be things like a new vendor, maybe your vendors change their invoice template, maybe it’s a bad scan or a handwritten invoice so the OCR is having trouble picking that up. So I’m going to go ahead and click Start, and it’s going to bring up the invoice we’re gonna look at today. I’m gonna click on this little pencil icon.

And if I had this flag checked to allow completed documents to bypass verification, the invoice would not stop in ExFlow data capture unless there was an issue with the OCR picking up some of the information that we said is required for our business. Okay. So, in my company or my environment, I am pushing my suppliers from D365. So Standard Accounts Payable suppliers. These are those vendor numbers. I’m pushing my vendors from D365 into ExFlow Data Capture. You can see the supplier number here. And here you can see where I’m picking up this information from. Let me try to make this a little bit smaller. Not too small. You can see here it is highlighted in red. It’s a little bit darker than the other ones but this is all the information on capturing. But let’s say the invoice number did not come over correctly or this is the first time I received an invoice for 3M. So I’ve got to train the OCR on how to pick that up. So the way I would do that, there’s two ways. The first is I can just come over here and double click.

And once I press this invoice through ExFlow Data Capture, the next time an invoice comes in for 3M, it will know that is where it picks up that invoice number. There’s also another way and this one, let’s just go ahead and delete this is what we call Lasso [SP]. So this is where I’m going to use my mouse and highlight what I want that invoice number to be. And you can see for where to find that invoice number. I have my invoice date here, my purchase order number. So this one is related to a PO, my vendors phone number, my tax amount, this invoice does not have sales tax. My total amount of the invoice. This delivery cost is related to charge codes in D365. So my ExFlow Data Capture template only has one charge code here, but I could have up to five. So I could have up to five here if I had to capture more than just freight. And my currency here is USD. Now, generally, our vendors in the U.S. are not putting currency on the invoices. So this is just defaulting from our supplier.

But if you are working in Europe, it’s pretty common to have those currencies on the invoice. In that case, you can actually read it in from the invoice as well. But since this is a U.S. vendor, we typically don’t see that. So when I say header level, this is the header level. And so if we’re only capturing header, that’s all we would do. But on this invoice, we are actually capturing line information as well. So if I come down here and click, I can see here is my item number. As I tap over, also my quantity, my unit price, and my total amount. Now I’m not capturing the description or the unit of measure. But if I needed to capture that information, my reads off template could include that information. So I could capture that here as well. I’m gonna go ahead and click Okay. And it’s going to bring up another invoice. By default, this is not one we’re working with. So I’m just gonna go back to my list page. We’ll see my invoices gone from the Verify page. If I look in process, we’ll see that we have document export in progress, which means that this invoice is going to be flowing through into D365 now. So we’ll go into D365. So ExFlow is a module within D365. So it’s embedded in there.

So if I go look at my modules page, I will see ExFlow. And this ExFlow vendor invoice management, this is for my…Right now I have my AP invoice in Catalan [SP]. And this is my workspace for AP invoice. So I can see here. I can choose my companies or change my companies. If I have access to multiple companies, I can also see my view cross-company. I have invoices ready for import. This is one. So that is that invoice that we were working on. So if I click show cross-company, we still have…we have two out there. And if I click Back, it’s going to update those again. These open invoices in import form, so this is my work queue. So as an AP invoicing person, this is invoices that I have received from [inaudible 00:09:40] that have not yet been processed through…have not been sent out for approval. So these are invoices that I have to process of make sure they get out there and set out for approval.

The open invoice is in document form. So these are invoices that have been sent out for approval. And so there’s nothing for me to actively do on these. It’s really just for me to monitor and so I can see what status these are in. And the approved invoice us in document form. These are invoices that have been approved, fully approved, but for whatever reason, they have not posted yet in the system. So, maybe I have a dimension, main account dimension or account structure issue. So there’s something I have to look at here. Now we’re going to…Hopefully, our invoice is fully imported in. We’re gonna go look at this. And I’m going to go to my…Import from all will show me all of my invoices. So today we’re just looking at a PO invoice, but we also support non-PO invoices, that’s import from expense. So I’m gonna go look at just my purchase order invoices since that’s what we’re dealing with today. And here is my invoice down at the bottom. Just a second, we’ll see my invoice images over here to the right. If I click Edit, we’ll be…And our Invoice is interesting. Just one second. Now this one also does have a side-by-side view. I have it turned off by default. But you could turn it on here if you wanted to. And then you’d see the invoice off to the right. You can also just click to show invoice, which would open this invoice in full screen.

And instead of D365 has the option to pop this out in a new window and so I could put my invoice image on one screen and D365 on another. So if I have two monitors, a lot of our customers prefer to do that. Now, with our purchase order invoices, from an accounts payable invoicing perspective, I do not have to code this. So the main accounts and dimensions, those are coming from my procurement setup. So I don’t have to code this. That’s more for those non-PO invoices. And we’ll see here I have all three or both of those lines as well as my charge code that we captured. If I scroll over, my line matching policy is going to be displayed here. Now this is my line matching policy per standard D365. So on this invoice, on this PO, I’m requiring three-way matching. So I have to have that PO, the product receipt, and the invoice all match. My match result is here. So ExFlow will show those match results at the time of invoicing, this price variance. So that means I have a variance from my purchase order cut out to my invoice. So I have a price variance there. Now a lot of times, my match result here may be quantity variance.

So if I think about it for those invoices that I’m receiving via email, I’m obviously going to be receiving those invoices in advance of the product, because the invoice is going to arrive a lot faster. So if my match result here said quantity variants, ExFlow does have a parameter that will allow me to put these invoices on hold. And I can do it by vendor, vendor group, or company. But let’s say for three of my habit set to five days, what’s gonna happen is over the next five days, ExFlow would run a batch shop, and it’s going to try to match this invoice to a posted product receipt. If it can, during those five days, it will go ahead and match it and take it to the next step, whether that’s autoapproving it or sending it out for approval. If it cannot, if those five days have come and gone and it still has that quantity variance, it is going to send it to the approver to take action on. So in this case, I’m the approver.

My workflow is set up to be whoever submitted the PO would be the approver. That’s not the way your workflow has to be set up. That’s just the way mine is. Now obviously, I can’t actually approve this because without sorting out the issue with quantity variants if there was one, because standard D365 will not let you post an invoice where there is a quantity variance and three-way matching. If my match results here said matched, this invoice would automatically approve. But because I have a price variance, I do expect to have to approve this invoice. So I’m gonna go ahead here and click Post, which is going to send this into the workflow and it’s going to evaluate whether or not this invoice can be auto-approved. So it is running. So our ExFlow is running that matching results again, because somebody could have come behind me and corrected or changed that product receipt. So it needs to run it again at the time of sending this out for approval, just to make sure that those results are still valid. And well, this is posting, I’m going to go back to my PowerPoints for one second.

So, once a day, an email will go out, and it will tell me “Here are your invoices to approve.” And it’ll have a list of all my invoices from that day, as well as any invoices from prior days that I had not approved, and there’ll be a link to this portal. Now I can click on this portal from my phone, my computer, my tablet wherever I am, and I will be able to view and approve those invoices. So before we go to approve this, let’s go to the vendor account. So the vendor we’re looking at here’s 3M. And this is standard D365 vendors, accounts payable. So I’m gonna go look at my transactions here. And let me just clear out some of this noise. So I see my invoice here, it is not approved. So right now, the payment proposals one, the invoice would not be picked up for payment. Whether or not the invoice is approved, up here from the vendor transactions, I can show invoice, just going to show me that image of the invoice. Whereas if you click documents, which would show me an image of the invoice off to the right, but it’s also going to show me where this invoice is in the approval chain. If I scroll over, there we go, we can see that I am the current approver.

This bottom line, we see that because it matched, that it was auto-approved. So that bottom line is approved and there is a common in here system approved by ExFlow. Now if all my lines had the match result or they specialize all the matched, this full invoice would be approved. Now you can approve within D365. There is a workspace out here. But today, I’m going to go look at that portal that we were talking about. So, let’s go ahead and look at that. We’re going to refresh this because it was already open. And we should see my invoice down here at the bottom pull in. So I’m just going to open this one up. And we see here there is a price variance. If I click here, it will show me the quantity on the PO and the amount. So my amount on my PO was 950 for this line and 525 for this line. So that is where my variance is coming from. I have variants on both lines, and that is displayed here. But since it’s the same PO, I only have to click there once. Now, ExFlow will let me add some notes in here. I can also if I wanted to…If I have email enabled, I could, for example, send a chat to Vince here. And these chats will stay with the invoice both in D365 in the approval portal. If I have any backup documentation, I can go ahead and attach it here.

And now I can approve my invoice, reject it, which does require a comment. I can put it on hold if maybe I need to go back to the vendor and see, you know, what this variance is about. I can forward it if somebody else should be approving it. I’m going to go ahead and approve here. Okay? And the last thing I’ll show you before we open up to questions is going to be the accruals piece. So, we’ve looked at accruals. Now’s a good time because we are closing the month of March, right? So let’s say we’re closing the month of March. We have received some invoices out there but they have not yet been approved. So we have to get those accrued. So ExFlow has a job that will assist with that. So it’s going to create a journal for the accrual of estimated cost. And I’m going to pick up my invoices through 331 and post my journal on 331 and reverse it on 401. And this is gonna create a standard D365 reversing journal for me, journal 1449.

So if we go out to the general ledger, we should see this journal sitting out here for us. It is 1449. It is marked as a reversing entry without reversing data 401. And when my lines open, we’ll see all of my debits were brought in as well as any credits that I have out there, because I did not filter those out. Now this is an unposted journal. So that means that any changes can be made. Now, the invoice that we just saw, a purchase order, a three-way matching would not be pulled in here because that product receipt is… In fact, they’re kind of de facto doing that accrual. This is more for those non-PO invoices, as well as any two-way matching invoices that you have out there. And that’s what this is going to pull in. So we have all my debits out there. We’ll come back to these blank lines in just a second. My offset, my accrued purchases account is coming from my ExFlow parameters. And if I scroll over, I’ll also see that reversing entry and that reversing date.

And we do have some work to do. Obviously, we can’t post this journal because we have some missing accounts out here. And the way this happens is for those non-PO invoices, ExFlow does allow either AP to code those or some of our customers they will Why should AP do it? They don’t own the budget. The budget owner/approvers should be responsible for this. So in these cases, AP did not code the invoices, the approver is going to, and so that’s why they’re blank. At the accrual time, I can see ExFlow show invoice, which would show me an image of the invoice or documents. And this is going to show me where this invoice is in the approval chain. So I can see this invoice is apparently on Vince’s list, so I know who to go back to and ask if I have questions. Okay? So that was a very high-level overview of ExFlow. I think we have five minutes left. So if we have any questions, we’ll open it up now to any questions.

Melissa: Great, thanks, Tina. Yeah, the question pane is open. So if you have any questions, just feel free to type it in there. I know we are recording this webinar today. So all the registrants will get an email with a link to the recording today. And of course, make sure you could reach out to any of us at Encore. If you have any questions, I can hook you guys up. I don’t see any other questions. But if you had anything else you wanted to add, that would be great or we could just wrap it up.

Tina: Okay. Yeah, I think that’s all I have to add, I think Kelly mentioned we do have those public demos. We also have on those public demos, a full demo of ExFlow. So that would include the cost invoice, as well as taken to some of the approvals a little bit more. So it’s not so fast. So if you’re interested in this, you can also sign up for the public demo for the I think we called the front end AP, and it’s every Wednesday twice a day.

Melissa: Great. That sounds good. If there’s a link for that, we could always throw that into the email as well to go out to everyone. So just let me know. We’ll make sure that goes out. Okay. Well, I don’t see any questions coming in. So thank you so much, both of you, Tina, and Kelly for joining us today. And we’ll just close this down. Thanks, everybody for attending.

Kelly: Thank you for having us.

Michelle: Have a good afternoon.