Introduction
You can set up an external optical character recognition (OCR) service to automate your vendor invoicing processes in Dynamics 365 Finance. This module explores the features and capabilities of intelligent OCR that can help your organization be more efficient when working with vendor invoices.
Finance supports the full life cycle of vendor invoices, from receiving to payment. During this process, a manual entry might be made incorrectly, which would potentially cause problems with payments and accounting down the line. To enable your organization to have a more efficient vendor invoicing process, Finance supports OCR services for handling vendor invoices. An external optical character recognition (OCR) program scans documents for automatic upload. Through this program, you can set up the vendor invoicing process to be automated to speed up the invoicing process and prevent potential user errors.
OCR is a process that returns machine-readable metadata by scanning documents. These documents can include invoices, and by using OCR, you can set up these invoices to be automatically scanned and entered in to Finance. With an external service implemented, accounts payable clerks and managers can process invoices more efficiently. It can also reduce errors that come from improper manual entry.
This module will explore the elements of OCR that can help make your business more efficient.
The preceding diagram shows the first steps of the OCR service, which begins with the invoice. The scenarios throughout this module show the different roles within an organization to help you understand how they interact with different parts of the invoicing process. The next unit will focus on the setup within a Finance environment.
For more information, see Invoice automation for scanned documents.