130 - OCR: Optical Character Recognition in Dynamics NAV 2018

OCR: Optical Character Recognition in Dynamics NAV 2018

Today I want to go through OCR, OCR actually been part of NAV for a long time, but it always been done as a third party its not been really native to the product, but microsoft decided to ship an element of OCR within the base product which then connects to a third party, so right here in the role center for the business manager, we can see that we have some incoming documents, we click on that, we have some incoming documents, if I click on that, so this is an OCR element. Here are documents coming in, this is in the base product.

OCR Set up
Let's scroll a little bit back and see how we can set that up, if I go here into service connections, go into OCR service setup and setup, here I can actually connect to the OCR service and if it's already filled out in the demo database with these links. The sign-up URL, and service URL, and you can actually click on those and you can start signing up. And where you go from there?

Well, you actually go into Kofax, Kofax is a company that does OCR do they probably made some deal with Microsoft they will be recommended. Like I said there is a lot of other OCR service provides, you don't have to go with Kofax but yeah I decided to try it out, obviously, it set up for that, let me show you how that worked out.

I signed up and upon signing up I got, of course, a password for my account, authorization key, I plug those in, enable that, and then I was good to go. So that is really all you have to do to setup this, now let's see how it actually works in action.

If I go into my incoming documents, Kofax will actually give you an email address and you can email to that invoices and it will start processing them and synchronizing to here. But what I’m gonna do is just create one from file and before I actually get this in, I can show you here how the invoice looks like, it's super simple its rental expense from Progressive Home furnishings and you know it's to Cronus, who its a demo company etc, very very simple.

I click on that, Import it and now I get a record around this, you can see that the test invoice is selected. So what happens now? Now we want the system to figure everything out for us and we don't have to type anything in right? that's the whole idea behind this. It actually did create a record for this and I have to go ahead and send it to the OCR service which is right here, now there is a job that does that, if I could have waited probably 5 minutes which would have made this video very boring, it had sent itself.

So now it's sent to the OCR service and I can actually go on to the web, I’m just gonna go look at all documents here and see if it actually came through. So you can see here it is I just sent this test invoice 3. Document is creating and trying to figure things out with it, So it's processing it, I look at what is in progress o it's doing its job.

Now we just wait for it to actually finalize it, just refresh it here a little bit, not really sure how long it's gonna take. Meanwhile, while this is actually going through, you can take a look at a few things that you can do on here, so of course it's connected to an approval process so it means that you can send this for approval and you can also map texts, so there is a mapping element here, and here I can actually map trental expense to a particular GL account or a particular name to lender etc etc.

So this is the same mapping as we have in the bank reconciliation, which is just kind of interesting, its using this text to account mapping element in NAV which is kind of nice because this could be extended to a much greater use, if your little bit inventive or you need some programs help to take this to the next level. Like for example, it would be nice to have anything that starts with rental go to the same account, so rental star, you can't do that here but small programming can help that.

Create a journal line
So it's finished now and it's release, so let's go ahead and receive it, it is received, so another thing, I can click and receive it manually but obviously on job queue it could come back. Now it's released and received, and I’m gonna go ahead and create a journal line. You can create PL documents as well and then it would create header and lines, I did try that and I failed. I wasn't gonna spent a whole lot of time trying to configure that, obviously I did not see any mapping perse where it should be looking out for the lines and where it should be looking at for the header. I haven't seen that with Kofax, I’m sure that it exists somewhere or maybe I have to contact them to get that right, but It did fail on doing those things. But creating a journal line did work, sort of.

So I actually hit here, create journal and it did create it. If I go ahead and edit this main screen here to see what it actually is mapping you can see it mounts the mouth correctly, the document date, the pix w is USD currency which is something that is default, we can see the vendor order number right here, and it's complaining that there is no tax on this, we didn't have any tax so that's ok. I can also go ahead and open up the record related to this,I actually noticed that is missing the account number here so that could have been defaulted from setting inside the system, but kind of the point of the OCR is that it did actually take a look at the invoice, did find a few items to put in here.

It's not perfect and you probably have to tweak it once you get into setting this up, but at least it sort of works right?, and in my mind you should be able to connect to many different OCR services out there and I’m sure you can, I might just have to look into that even though Kofax is the one that's recommended it doesn't have to be the one to go with.