User Guide INVOICES

User Guide of the INVOICES system.

Author: Jerome Pourbaix, 09/2005, version 1.12

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Table of content
Version..................................................................................................3

Introduction.........................................................................................3
Pre-requisite..................................................................................................................3
INVOICES version.......................................................................................................3

Scan.......................................................................................................4
Image quality................................................................................................................4
What to check during scan?..........................................................................................4

Verify....................................................................................................5
Tips and tricks..............................................................................................................5
Verification of a new supplier......................................................................................6
Fields to verify..............................................................................................................8
How to process multi-page invoices?.........................................................................10

Optimize.............................................................................................11
Template (Invoices definition)...................................................................................11
Identification fields.....................................................................................................12
Captured fields to optimize........................................................................................14
How to create a variant?.............................................................................................17
The filters....................................................................................................................18
CHECK THE OPTIMISATIONS!.............................................................................18
Daily task....................................................................................................................19
Weekly task................................................................................................................20

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Version
Version Date Modification
1.00 20/12/04 Creation
1.07 12/04/05 Updates
1.11 21/07/05 Verification of the first invoice of a new supplier, Optimize details, the ‘Check
Optimizations’ paragraph
1.12 01/09/05 Detail to key the Company name

Introduction
Here is a user guide of the INVOICES solution. It gives the main directions and some tips and
tricks to maximize the use of the solution.

Pre-requisite
Before reading this document, you must at least be trained on INVOICES.

You can find more documentation in:

- the HELP file (press F1 key in one of the INVOICES module),
- the PDF documentation available on the INVOICES installation CD:
“Handbook INVOICES eng.pdf”.

INVOICES version
This document has been build for INVOICES 5.3 sp2, 5.3 sp3 and 5.3 sp4.
But, by experience, most of the information contained in this document can be reused for the
preceding INVOICES version.

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Scan
Image quality
The images are the base of the process. So, the image quality is very important.
It is used for:
- Supplier identification
- Interpretation
- Verification
- Archive

The following documents are the worst we can have:

- Fax
- Handwritten invoices: most of the information is handwritten, although the logo and
the address is printed
- Small paper size, with sticker
- Invoices with stamps.

Important: the top fifth part of the invoice must be clean: no stamps, no handwritten
annotations,…

What to check during scan?

- No black lines on the image
- The image is well de-skewed
- If there is double feed, check that all pages are well scanned.

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Verify
Tips and tricks
To capture a field with the mouse, there are 3 ways:
- Double click on the field. Then, the limits of the field will be found automatically.
Then, if it does not work:
- Select the limit with the mouse.
- Press the key “Ctrl”, and, simultaneously, select the limit with the mouse: the field
boarder will be exactly the rectangle you have drawn.

To be efficient in Verify, avoid using the mouse wherever possible. Prefer to use the
keyboard.
Examples:
- Use the Tab key to go from one field to another one
- Use the Enter key to validate the field value
- When there is a message box like “validation error. Yes or No”, press Enter, or use the
Tab key to select the other answer.
- To approve the invoice, press Enter
- To zoom and un-zoom, use the keys F3 and F4
- To move the image, use the keys Ctrl + arrows.
Most of the time, the mouse is used to draw a rectangle around a field on the image. That’s
all.

Exception: if this is the first invoice of a new supplier in INVOICES, them it’s very important
to use the mouse to delimit the field on the image!

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Verification of a new supplier
In Verify, when it’s a new supplier for the system, then there is no supplier name available.

The first verification is very important because:

- this first verification is used to create the template
- the fields are learned one by one based on the way it is verified
- this first template is re-used immediately for the next invoices of this supplier.

Step by step, here is what to do:

1. Key the new supplier name:

Then, for each field:

2. If there are field propositions (on the right of the field), check which one is the good
one, and then press ‘Enter’ to accept it. If you accept a proposition, then the field will
be considered as ‘learned’, so you should not need to optimize it later one.

Example:

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 For example, the field ‘InvoiceNumber’ has 3 propositions available. Just click on this
button to select the good proposition.

3. Field by field, if the field has not been found, selects it WITH THE MOUSE:
DOUBLE-CLICK the field. Then, the position is memorized and can be used for the
next invoices of this supplier.

4. Even if the field is Complete (Green box), check it to be sure it’s the good value. In
case of it’s not the good field, then pick the new one with the mouse (DOUBLE-
CLICK)

5. Line-item: use the “Draw” button to define the line-item.

We can call that a “light” optimization: it means we do not need to go in Optimize to have
some interesting results. For small suppliers, most of the time it is not necessary to go in
Optimize to have a better invoice definition.

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Fields to verify
Here is the list of fields which are verified in Verify

Supplier name
Key the supplier name.
If the name is already in the list, simply press ‘Enter’.

To the question “Would you want to re-interpret”, answer ‘Yes’ (simply press ‘Enter’).

Then, as the template already exists, the invoice will be re-interpreted based on the template.

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Coy
This is the Company name to whom it is invoiced.
It’s one of the following:
ETSA UTILITIES
UTILITIES MGMT Pty Ltd
ETSA FRC Pty Ltd
Dos:
Key exactly one of the company name.
Or, really faster: key the company code!
2 for ETSA UTILITIES
4 forUTILITIES MGMT Pty Ltd
9 for ETSA FRC Pty Ltd

Exception: if the company name printed in the invoice is not in the list, then key ‘0’ or key
‘Wrong ETSA name’. Then, in Cockpit, it will be decided if yes or no the invoice must be
paid.

ABN
Verify/key the ABN number of the vendor.
It must have always 11 numerical characters. This field is mandatory. If there is no ABN
number on the invoice, key a dummy value as ‘00000000000’.

Invoice number
Dos:
Verify/key the invoice number as it is on the document.
Don’ts:
- To recapture or to delete the 0 on the left. All the following values can be kept like
that. The search will succeed although there are no the zeros.
0000000123456
00123
00000123456789
- To delete the specific characters as the ‘/’, the ‘:’ and do so on.

Invoice date
Dos:
The invoice date must have the following format: DDMMYY.
If you key the invoice date, you have 2 choices:
- Key it with the format DDMMYY.
- If the supplier has been optimized, key it as printed by the supplier. And then, when
you press Enter, it will be modified automatically in the format DDMMYY.

PO number
The PO number always starts with 45 or 46 or 47.

Amounts: UnplanCost
The UnplanCost is the freight cost generally. This field is optional.

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Amounts: SubTotal, GSTTotal, InvoiceTotal
The amounts are most of the time on the last page. It’s possible to capture them on the other
pages.
You can capture the ‘dollar’. It will be skipped automatically.

Credit
If it’s a Credit note or an adjustement note, the value is 1. Otherwise, the value is 0.

CopyInvoice
If it’s a Copy (not an original invoice), the value is 1. Otherwise, the value is 0.

Line item: LI_QTY

Verify/key the quantity of the line.

Line item: LI_UNIT

Verify/key the unit price of the line.

Line item: LI_TOTAL

Verify/key the total price of the line, excluding the GST.

Line item: LI_Description

Verify/key the description of the line.
All characters are accepted, even the specific characters.

How to process multi-page invoices?

For invoices with multi-pages, it’s not necessary to mark ‘manually’ the last page as the last
page of the invoice. If the information we want to key are on the first page, then we do not
need to go on the other pages.

How to mark a page as the last page of the invoice? In Verify, menu “Invoice/Set as last
page” (shortcut Alt-L)

Whatever the other pages are ‘pages’ or ‘appendices’, all of them are archived with the first
page.

A double-sided invoice is processed exactly as a multi-page invoice.

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Optimize
Template (Invoices definition)
The image quality for the template is very important. It is important that the invoice used to
create the template is representative of the supplier.

Dos:
The top fifth part of the invoice must be as clean as possible. This top fifth of the invoice is
used to categorize the template. That’s why the top fifth must be representative.

Don’ts:
- To have stamps or handwritten annotation on the first fifth part of the image.
- Invoices faxed
- To have a black line due to a dirty scan (See example below)

Identification
Identification is made in two main steps.

The first step is to narrow down the number of possible candidates of invoice definitions that
the current invoice can possibly belong to.
This is done by a very fast comparison of the top fifth part of the first image in the image with
the previously calculated values of all the invoice definitions. All this information of all the
invoice definitions is kept in the local memory and takes 80 bytes per invoice definition.
The output from this first step is a sorted list with candidates. This list can contain 10
candidates at most but will sometimes not contain any candidates if the found candidates got
too low points.

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In the second step of the identification, INVOICES loops over the candidates found in order
of the score they got in the first step. Logo identifiers are tested first because they are much
faster to identify.

Let’s take an example:

If the correct invoice definition lies at position 7 in the list of candidates and only logo is
needed to connect in the that invoice definition than INVOICES will first try to find the logo
for the first 6 candidates in the list and on the seventh it will be identified if it finds the logo.
No value identifiers will be interpreted at all in this case. If INVOICES cannot match the
invoice to any of the candidates by only using the logo identifier it will then try to find all the
value identifiers for the candidates.
 When the invoice has been identified the correct invoice definition is read from the
database and the invoice is interpreted according to it.
 If the invoice is not identified then a new invoice definition will be created and the
field will be found using auto learning.
Before an identified invoice is interpreted it is first filtered using the filters in the invoice
definition.

Automatic learning of single item fields

Automatic learning is done by first searching for the titles entered in the field profiles. The
values connected to the title are then searched for in the directions indicated in the field
profiles. All the objects in the image is interpreted when searching for titles. The best three
suggestions are saved to the invoice for each field.

Identification fields
Logo identifier

Things to think about when selecting and drawing a rectangle for a logo identifier:

1. The thicker the lines in the object are the better. Here is an example of a good logo and
a bad logo.

Bad logo

Good logo

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 2. Do not drag the rectangle to close to the edge of the image. Illustrated by these two
examples:

Good rectangle Bad rectangle

If the rectangle is to close to the edge, INVOICES will not be able to identify the invoice if
the logo is a bit higher on the invoices than the invoice definition.

Value identifier
Do not be afraid to use something other than ABN or Phone number as identifier. You can
probably even chose something that is not unique for the supplier because the first step of the
identification will define a list of candidate based of the top fifth part of the image, so it
probably will not get into the list of possible candidates.

Only one filter may be applied to an identifier. Only filters that overlap the identifier
rectangles are used when identifying.

Field name What to do Mandatory

ID Logo Select a logo Yes
ID ABN Select the ABN number Yes
ID Telephone Select a telephone number

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Captured fields to optimize
For all the fields which are mandatory:
- Define the position of the Value
- Define the Title
Then, field by field, here is a list of the main task to do:
Field name What to do Mandatory
InvoiceNumber Define the exact format if possible Yes
InvoiceDate Define the exact format Yes
PO number (nothing to do) Yes
SubTotal Amount Check the position (fixed or vertically fixed)
GSTTotal Amount Check the position (fixed or vertically fixed) Yes
InvoiceTotal Amount Check the position (fixed or vertically fixed) Yes
ABN (nothing to do) Yes
UnplanCost Draw 2 dummy boxes for the value and the title, key ‘0.00’ in the value
field, and define the decimal places with 2.
CopyInvoice Draw a dummy field for the title, and select ‘copy’ in the title list
Credit Draw a dummy field for the title, and select ‘credit in the title list
Coy Check the position
LineItem Define the 4 fields, and define the header identification

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General information, for all the fields
Value and Title
To capture a field with the mouse, there are 3 ways:
- Double click on the field. Then, the limits of the field will be found automatically.
This is the fastest and the easiest way. And, this the way used by Interpret to
determine the limit of a field.
- Select the limit with the mouse. The result is most of the time the same as double-
click.
- Press the key “Ctrl”, and, simultaneously, select the limit with the mouse: the field
boarder will be exactly the rectangle you have drawn.

Title
If there is no title available (for example because the title is printed in black on a very dark
background), do not define any title; leave the Title box empty. Then, the actual position of
the value will be used for the invoices in production. Hypothesis: we’re in a situation where
the field is fixed on the document.

Engine
For the printed fields, use only the one of the following engine:
- Default
- Bold
- Matrix
Never use Handwritten engine for the printed field. The handwritten engine could give some
good results in Optimize, better than the other engine, but, as the test is done on only one field
this result is not representative; very often the Handwritten engine is worst than the other
engine on the printed characters.
Note: avoid as much as possible to change the engine. Keep the default one!

Work on the engine for the Value and for the Title, if necessary.

Position
By default, the position is ‘fixed’.
And most of the time, whatever the field, the position can remained ‘fixed’.

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If you do not know, leave it ‘fixed’!

In some cases, the position can vary ‘up and down’, for example for some amounts which are
printed just below the line item, but not on the bottom of the invoice.
Important: if the position can vary ‘up and down’, then the title must also vary up and down
(this is logical) and, very important, the title must be selected by a DOUBLE-CLICK!. It
cannot be defined as a group of word selected drawing a box with the mouse.

By experience, the two other choices (‘vary left and right’, ‘vary in all the directions’) are
never used.

Invoice date
Update the date format! The date format is the one used by the supplier.
Example: if the supplier prints a date like 9/10/2004, then the date format is DMMYYYY.

The date format specifications that can be used are:

Format Alternate format Meaning

D D(1) Day written with one or two digits, 1-31

DD D(2) Day written with two digits, 01-31

M M(1) Month written with one or two digits (1-9, 10, 11, or 12)

MM M(2) Month written with two digits, 01-12

MMM M(3) Month written with the first three letters of the name. (JAN,
FEB, etc.)

MMMM M(4) Full month name

Y Y(1) Year written with one or two digits, 8, 98 … (the tens digit
may be omitted for the years 2000-2009)

YY Y(2) Year written with two digits, for example 00

YYYY Y(4) Year written with four digits, for example 2000

X Separator character

Separator characters in date fields:

To define separator characters in date fields, use the Specification box on the General
settings page of the field. You do not have to specify separator characters such as slash (/),
period (.), comma (,), hyphen (-) and space ( ) that can appear on an invoice in a date field.
If you do not specify separator characters, the specification DDMMYY can mean:

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  251299
 25/12/99
 25-12-99
 25 12 99 (Note that spaces in dates are not included in the output string for the date.)
However, because a slash (/) can easily be confused with the number one (1) during
interpretation, we recommend that you specify separator characters using the X format
character, as shown below.
To specify one or more specific separator characters, put them in brackets after the X.
Examples:
X [ : ] a colon
X [ : * . ] a colon, asterisk or period
X [ ] a space
X [ ] no separator characters are allowed
Example
D D X [ : ] M M X [ : ] Y Y Y Y Matches this date: 24:11:2000
DX[.]MMMMYYYY Matches this date: 18. November 2002

Invoice number
Give a detail format as much as possible. The advantages of a detail format are the following:
- It will help to interpret the value
- If the wrong field is interpreted, then field status will be a validation error. You are
sure to verify it.

If the format is too wide (X(1-20) for example), there is the risk that a wrong field is captured,
and then no alerts will be visible in Verify. The field could be transferred with the error.

How to create a variant?

Some suppliers have more than one template for their invoices. So, to manage these invoices,
there is the Variant. It is simple to create:
Add an extension in the ‘Supplier name’ field. Then, it will create automatically
another template. The extension should be meaningful as ‘A3’ or ‘L’ for landscape’ or
‘MEL’ for Melbourne, …

Example:
This supplier could need a variant:

REXEL REXEL rotate

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The invoices are from the same supplier, but the logo is not the same. It could work with the
ABN number, but, in this particular case, the ABN number cannot be well captured due to the
logo which is printed on the ABN.

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The filters
INVOICES can use filters when interpreting invoices to remove background shading.

When you optimize an invoice definition, you can apply any number of filters as needed to
improve interpretation. For example, if a title is not correctly interpreted due to background
shading, apply a filter.

How to apply a filter:

1. Select the Filter button at the top of the window. Select one of the filter types in the
Filter type box.
2. Use your mouse to draw a frame around the area where INVOICES is to apply the
filter. It can cover the data object you want to capture, or part of it. For example, the
value, the title, or both. The filter frame should extend both above and below the
shaded area, if possible.

3. To delete, move, or resize a filter frame, right-click in it and select Remove, Move, or
Resize. You can drag the entire frame to a new position, or you can drag an edge to
resize it.

4. INVOICES filters the area. You see the result on the image, and the interpreted value
is updated. For value identifiers and single item fields, click Interpret to update the
interpreted value. Repeat as needed, trying various filter types, until you get the best
result.

5. If a filter covers only part of a data object, or is next to one, click the Update filters
button at the top of the window.

6. To stop drawing filters, select any item in the learning dialog.

CHECK THE OPTIMISATIONS!

How to be sure that the templates are well optimized?
How to know if each field is well learned?
How to be sure that YOU know well how to optimize?
The best way is to TEST!

Here is a list of steps:

- Scan 5 invoices of a new supplier
- Interpret them
- Verify the first one: as it’s the first invoice, verify it carefully. See the paragraph
“Verification of a new supplier” for the details.
- Then, verify the second invoice. There are 2 possible results:
o The second invoice is well re-interpreted based on the template created with
the first invoice. So, no need to optimize!
o The second invoice is re-interpreted, but, the result could be better. Then, it’s
time to optimize.

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 - Check the results with the 3 other invoices in Verify.

If necessary, optimize the supplier.

Then, reprocess 5 invoices with Scan, Interpret and Verify. It should work.

Conclusion: Applying this whole process for the first suppliers (50 suppliers, 200 suppliers,
more?), you are able to train yourself with the Optimization. Then, creating your experience
on these first suppliers, you are able to verify and optimize properly.

Daily task
Which supplier to optimize?
Do we need to optimize all the suppliers?
Do we need to have all the status to ‘learned’ in Optimize, for each template?

There is the basic rule of the 80/20. It means that 20% of your suppliers represent 80% of the
number of invoices to process. So, we do not need to optimize all the templates, knowing that
some of the supplier will send probably less than 5 invoices in the year.

How to define which supplier to optimize?

In Optimize, select the templates with the status
In Optimize, classify the templates with the following criteria:
- All the invoices with the status ‘Known’
- Click 2 times on the colon ‘Total’ to classify the templates by decreasing order.
o And then optimize all the following templates which have been used at least 3
times.
(The value 3 can be reviewed! It depends of the number of invoices, the number of templates,
and the ratio invoices per template)

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Weekly task
Check the identification rate
It means, check that the invoices are well identified with each suppliers.

In Optimize, classify the templates with the following criteria:

- All the invoices with the status ‘Learned’
- Click 2 times on the colon ‘Total’ to classify the templates by decreasing order.
- And the work on the following templates:
o Total of processed invoices greater than 30
o Identification rate lower than 80%
(The values 30 and 80% can be reviewed! It depends of the number of invoices, the number of
templates, and the ratio invoices per template)

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For all these templates, check why the identification rate is poor.
Some examples:
- Logo is cut off, and poor quality invoice (we see perforated holes)
- 0% identification rate, because the invoice definition is different from the scanned
invoices! Need to do a second invoice definition for this supplier.

For some suppliers, it is necessary to define more than one invoice definition. The other
invoice definitions could be named as the same one, but with a “2” in the Description field for
example.

Delete some templates

Some templates can be deleted for the following reason:
- The template is not used since a ‘long time’
- There is not a good image used to create the template: to dirty for example

How to delete a template?

- Select the template you want to delete. You can classify the templates with different
criteria:
o Classification based on the date of creation
o Classification based on the date of the last use of the template
o Classification based on the identification rate
- Delete these templates

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Sometimes, depending of the local organization, there is always invoices in the system. As
there are invoices attached to the templates, it’s not possible to delete immediately the
templates. So, we need to mark the templates:
- to be able to delete them later when no more invoices will be linked to the template,
- to avoid any new identification based on these templates.

How to ‘mark’ these templates to be deleted?

- Open the template
- Change the supplier name, adding for example the 2 characters ZZ in front of the
name. Then, in Optimize, it will be easy to filter these templates (Search for suppliers
name starting with ZZ). And also it will quite improbable to use one of these ZZ
templates in Verify during a manual identification of an invoice.
- Modifiy the ID fields to be sure that any invoices will match the template
automatically during Interpret:
o Disable the logo
o Disable the ABN
o Change the value in the 3rd ID to something like “999999999”
Then, next time some templates need to be deleted, the ZZ templates should be deleted easily.

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