AP Automation with OnBase

Okay. Hello everyone and thank you for joining the Accounts Payable and Invoice Automation webinar. A couple housekeeping items before we get started. This webinar, like all our others, are recorded. If you have any questions, please post those in the GoToWebinar question panel, so we can read those throughout the webinar. Just let you know, we are having a couple issues with audio, so there may be a couple parts in this webinar where you may have to adjust your volume, so I do apologize in advance for that. So, let’s go ahead and get started.

So, this is the webinar on Accounts Payable and Invoice Automation. Hopefully you guys find a lot of value in this webinar as Accounts Payable is such a critical department for any organization. We would like to help speed up any type of the invoice processing to reduce errors, delays, and of course get your vendors paid faster. Hyland has a lot of different tools and modules to automate the invoice processing, and to improve your processes. So hopefully, you guys can find value in this webinar.

Before we get started, we are doing a 2020 OnBase webinar series. Listed here on the screen, we do have some other webinars that we will be hosting this year, so please go to our website and sign up for these if you haven’t already. I do like to mention that the Migrate Report Services to Reporting Dashboard webinar on March 4th is a pretty important one, as Report Services is the module that is being sunsetted with Hyland. So, if you are using that right now, that may be a good webinar for you to look into. Or if you’ve never used Reporting Dashboard, that definitely gives you an opportunity to see that module a little bit closer.

So just a little bit about myself. My name is Cailen Myers, I am a senior consultant here at RPI. It’s been supporting OnBase for over 10 years, designing, implementing, supporting, upgrading. I feel like almost everything OnBase I’ve done. I do have quite a few OnBase certifications, and also EPIC certification. I specialize in healthcare, and then the EMR and ERP integration. And on a more personal level, I am a mom to three Siberian Huskies. And if I have any free time, I do like baking and scrapbooking.

But I’m sure you guys did not come here to hear about me, so let’s get started with the agenda. We’re going to go over the AP automation products and solutions, the OnBase solutions for AP automation, and then we’ll do a summary and answer any questions that we may need to not get to during the webinar.

So, the AP automation overview, I know most of you probably know what it is, but for those of you that are not as familiar, or with just like a little touch up. The reason we want to move to AP automation is because there’s a lot of pain points when we’re doing manual processing. Physical documents are passed back and forth, between departments, users’ locations. There’s continuous email stream. There could be a loss of invoices. Duplicate invoices. No line of sight. No accurate reporting. And manual invoice data entry is of course a very large pain point for time and mistakes.

So, if those manual pain points are not enough reason to move to AP automation, some additional reasons why, is to reduce the cost. So, we want to make the processes for doing the invoices faster, with less overhead. Qualify for early payment discounts. And of course, we want to avoid any of the late payment penalties that you may incur. We also want to reduce errors, so employees can actually focus on the exceptions and poor-quality images, and not having to manually key in the information correctly. We would like to reduce any delays, increase the percentage of straight through invoice processing, increase visibility, so everyone knows where the document is at all times. And then the request to check audit and matching.

Through AP automation, in a perfect world, you would capture the invoice, if that’s via scanner, email, faxes. I’m not sure if too many people use faxes anymore, but that’s still an option. Once you capture the invoice, then you would want to actually capture the data. Header data line items, data validation. Once you have all the data captured, you would want to do any type of exception or workflows. So, this would be included, invoice exceptions, vendor exceptions and manual reviews. This is usually something that someone in the AP department would be reviewing. And then of course we have the approvals.

So, once your document is in the system, you have all the values on it, you make sure you pass all the exceptions, now we need somebody to review this document with notifications, any exceptions, and also do any type of invoice coding. And then of course we need to store the document. And then there should be some type of EPR integration. I’m sorry, ERP integration, so we can process the payment. So, it’s great when we have the document, but of course we have to go ahead and process that payment afterwards.

Let’s talk about the product and solution. So, we want to capture the document itself, that actual invoice. So, we can use Yoga Capture, which allows for to a specific inbox or EDI. We can use the OnBase Mailbox Importer. This module will monitor an email address for any new emails, and it will bring the documents directly into OnBase. You can send them into a scan queue, or a workflow queue. There’s the more traditional, OnBase Scanning or OnBase Sweep, so if you want to put all your images in a location on the network and sleep those in. And then the OnBase EDI processor. There are other modules with OnBase that you can use, but these are some of the main ones that we typically see.

And then we want to capture our data. So, this is all the keyword values like I mentioned before. The line items, the header details. Those tools vary, depending on what features and functionality you’re looking at using. There is Kofax TotalAgility, Kofax ReadSoft Online, and then Brainware by Hyland. And all these options you can still use OnBase as well. So, everything we’re going through, you’re still going to be able to plug OnBase in here, use the software here. Whatever’s best for your organization.

Like I said, we want to receive the document. We want to capture the information off the document. And then we want to validate the document. Data validation can be done in Yoga Connect. It also can be done with Application Enabler. And then for the exceptions you can use the OnBase Workflow or the Kofax TotalAgility. You’ll see here along the side, a lot of the software that we use will give you a warning if something’s missing, or maybe it’s not sure if it’s the correct information or not.

So, once we received the document, we index document we approve the document, or we verify the document, work any exceptions, then we need the approvals. Does this manager approve it? Does this director approve it? And there’s many different tools as well that we can use for approvals. So, invoice has the APIA, or Invoice Automation, depending on what version of Infor you’re on. There is a SAP Process Director, OnBase Workflow, or you could also use OnBase Workflow Approval Management in conjunction with OnBase Workflow. So, we’re going to go into those a little bit deeper here in the next few slides.

I know that’s a lot to take in, so I’m just going to go over a couple of the different solutions they we’re offering. Again, for the AP automation, these can again be mixed and matched. You don’t have to use everything that we’re showing. It can be intertwined different ways. So, one solution that we are offering is OnBase Capture and Approvals. So, this solution would use OnBase to capture the documents. Again, the same way that most organizations are doing it. Via scanner, email, fax, EDI, scans or sweeps. Once the document is captured, we would run those through the Brainware by Hyland. This will automatically classify the document, which would put all the keywords on the documents, such as that invoice number, PO number line items. Once that is captured and processed, then it would go through a workflow for routing. This could use the standard Workflow, or it could also use the Workflow Approval Management. I am going to show a small demo of how the Workflow Approval Management works.

This is a demo of the OnBase Workflow Approval Management. The OnBase Workflow Approval Management is a module that would be used in conjunction with OnBase Workflow. The OnBase system admins would still look into Studio and create a lifecycle in the workflow. Once the lifecycle is created, they would then create an approval process within Studio. They would add the approval rules and the user groups. And then they would create a workflow queue that would use the Workflow Approval Management. Once everything is configured in Studio, they can then provide access to their super users to be able to create the actual workflow approval of management rules. That is all done in the OnBase Unity Client.

So, I have locked into OnBase Unity Client, I am going to go up to Approval Management, and then I’m going to select the approval process that my system administrator advised me to select. And this would be the AP Invoice Approval. In here you can see we have an auto approval path. This would be used if you have any type of invoices that can automatically be approved, and do not need any type of review or additional approvals. So, let’s just say, any invoices that are over… I’m sorry, that our $5, you can automatically approve those. And then it just goes to the normal processing.

In this example, you’ll notice that we have set up the auto approval path for the following criteria. So, we’re saying if all of the following conditions are true, so those conditions would be that the document type is an AP non-PO invoice and the company keyword is equal to 100. So, if these two pieces of criteria evaluate true, these invoices are automatically approved.

If we would like to send documents through an approval path, we would use the approval path down here. So, we have our first approval path, which is non-PO invoices. Again, let’s take a look at the high level here. So, this is just saying if this evaluates true, that document type is called AP non-PO invoices, we would then go ahead to our next level. So, this is telling us, if it is a non-PO invoice and it did not meet the criteria above, it would need to be approved by an AP Manager, or of course, the OnBase Manager account is set up in this one.

Let’s go to our next level approval. So, we’re still using the first level of approval logic, which is saying that this is a non-PO invoice that needs approval. We’ve already had our AP Manager approve it. However, this document is less than or equal to $500. Because it is less than or equal to $500, it needs approval from Frank Moore. We have another level of approval. So, this approval is telling us again, if the keyword is less than or equal to $1,500, this document needs to go to Tom Davis to approve, so on and so forth. Again, all these approval paths can be set up by your organization super users, because they’re going to know the business processes a lot better than the OnBase system admins. Thank you.

So, the Workflow Approval Management as explained in that video is something that the end users are able to set up once the OnBase system admins configure that access for them. And they would need to set up a few things in Studio.

So, after the documents or in the workflow approval queues, you still need your approvers to then go in and approve these documents. So, they can do that via the standards. OnBase Workflow, if you’re going through Unity Client, Web Client, OnBase client, Outlook integration or as of OnBase Foundation EP2, there is an AP invoice approval app and I actually have a very short demo on that as well, just so you can see what that application looks like.

This is a demo of the Hyland AP Invoice Approval app. The AP Invoice Approval app is a person-based application that delivers critical decision-making tasks to individuals with invoice approval responsibilities in OnBase. The web app dashboard, and also mobile app dashboard, provide users a simple view of the invoices that still need to be reviewed and approved, as well as the invoices that have previously been approved or rejected.

You’ll notice that items that require immediate attention for review are found in the Critical Items dashboard title, which you can see here on my screen if you select, see all those will show the critical items. You can then select the invoice by clicking on it from the list. On the left side of the screen are the details pertaining to the invoice, such as invoice number, vendor name due date, an invoice amount. On the right side of the screen is image of the invoice. Once you have reviewed the invoice, you can now approve it by selecting the Approve button. Here you can select a reason, and you can also enter any comments. And then you would select approve. Now when we originally opened the critical items, you’ll notice that there is only one invoice that was pending approval. We’ve approved that invoice and now there is nothing left in this queue to review.

You can return to the dashboard by clicking the back arrow. Again, you’ll notice that there’re no items in the critical items area. And now, there are seven approved invoices instead of six. If you’d like to reject an invoice, we’re going to go over here to the See All just to select a new invoice, considering we have nothing in our queue waiting. Again, we’re going to select an invoice, and now we’re going to hit the reject option. Same process as before. Now we have different reasons of why we’re rejecting it. So maybe it’s not my document, it was not completed, or maybe I want to write some additional comments and they can see why this is rejected. And then instead of hitting approved, now I’m going to hit reject.

You can also see up here, in the top left-hand corner, there is a dropdown, so can see how many invoices are pending approval…I’m sorry, are pending, are approved and are rejected. And then if we go back to our dashboard, again you’ll see everything is updated. Now we have seven pending, seven approved and three rejected. Also, on this dashboard, you’ll see an overall view of invoices that are overdue, due today due with five days, within 10 days. So, this is just a very nice visual to see when the invoices are due, or if they’re already past due. And that is the end of the AP invoice approval app.

Okay, cool. Again, this is a newer feature from Hyland, that you would need to be OnBase Foundation EP2. But I think it’s a great tool for your approvers, especially if they’re on the go all the time. They have that visibility into their invoices to approve and review no matter where they’re at. So then once the course document is approved, then we would send that information to the ERP system, and the document would link to the ERP system, so you can access it there or in OnBase.

While we were doing the demo, we did get a question from Emily. She would like to know if they already have this built Studio, is there a tool that easily transfer the workflow into the approval module… Approval Management module. If you already have a lifecycle created, you would just use an additional queue within that workflow queue that would be for the approval management. However, you would need to reconfigure that queue because there are a couple of different functions and actions that would need to be used. But the nice thing about the Workload Approval Management, when you configure it in the Unity client as far as the rules for approval is that you’re actually able to import the rules from a different applications. So, this may not help you, Emily, if you already have it set up in Workflow, but for future use you could actually import some logics from maybe Infor, or any other system that you may have. So hopefully that answers your question.

So, moving on. That is one solution, like I said mainly OnBase focused here. Another solution would be to use OnBase Capture and the Infor Approvals. So, the same idea would apply here. You can use OnBase for scanning, email, fax, EDI. So, however you want to bring that data in, I would still recommend going through the Brainware to do the data validation and classification. But the only difference that would happen here is you would actually use Infor for your invoice approval. The invoice approval does allow for the GL coding, the PO matching the approval management, and also you can do exception handling there as well. And then once it’s approved, the document would still be stored in OnBase, and it would be made visible both in your Infor and your OnBase system. So again, we’re just replacing, seeing the OnBase approvals with your Infor approvals. If that’s the software that you’re currently using.

Another solution that we see a lot of customers using, the Kofax ReadSoft Online. Sorry, I was going to call it read software. ReadSoft Online. This would be to capture the documents. So again, via scanner email or fax. Once the documents are captured, the Kofax ReadSoft would actually do the OCRing. The RSO, which is what they call the Kofax ReadSoft Online, has that 80% extraction rate, and goes as high as about 95%. it is adaptive, it has self-learning capabilities to improve processing speed and precision over time as application learns to locate the invoice data. The ReadSoft would do the bringing in the documents and classifying it. You could then send it to OnBase. So, in order to get it from the ReadSoft Online into the OnBase, you would want to use either Yoga Connect or the RSO connect, and then you would use those same types of approvals so OnBase. So, the Workflow, the Workflow Approval Management. And again, you could use the Invoice Approval app as well.

Once you have those documents approved within OnBase, same thing as before. We would go ahead and integrate that with your ERP system. So again, I have a small short demo on the RSO software and how it plays the OnBase. Let me kick that off for you.

This is a demo of Kofax ReadSoft Online, and OnBase by Hyland. Kofax ReadSoft Online is the software we’re using to capture all our documents. We can capture those by scanning, email, fax and other normal capture methods that we use today. Along the left-hand side. You’ll notice I have a couple options, upload, Verify, Rejected, On Hold, In Progress, Processed and All Documents. I am currently in the Verify queue. I am going to verify a document that came in through Kofax ReadSoft Online.

You’ll notice right on the main screen, I do have a little bit information about this document, such as date and time it was received, or the file name, status and a couple other fields. So, let’s select the last one on our list. The document will then open up for us so we can view it. We have an image of the document on the left-hand side. We have all our keyword values on the right-hand side. And then we have our line information on the bottom.

Kofax Read Software is not only importing our documents for us but is also capturing the information off the document. We want to make sure all this information is correct. So, you’ll notice that there are warning signs on any of the fields that it was not able to capture, or any of the fields that it may not know 100% if it was correct. So, all our buyer and supplier information was captured correctly, because we see the green check marks. Now we have to review the general information.

So, the first one we’re coming to is our invoice number. It looks like on the document there is no logic where it would be easy to tell what the invoice number is. So, we’re going to go ahead and say that there is no invoice number on this document, and hit tab. It then captured the invoice date, so you’ll see the date of 3/13/2019. And you’ll see on the actual document itself a box where it’s capturing that date, so that’s correct. We can hit tab again. And now our PO number, which is PO-12345. I am going to remove the PO-, and just use all numbers, and then hits tab.

The next fields it wants to verify our net amount, tax amount, a delivery cost, and a total amount. Our total amount is the $178.20. Our net amount is the $162. The tax amount is $16.20. And again, I’m just grabbing all this information from these fields over here. And there was no delivery cost. Now that I’ve entered in all the information. You’ll notice there are all green check marks along the right-hand side.

Now we want to move along to the bottom. So, we have our different line items here. Just for purposes of this demo, I’m just going to use the filter feature and select items that are already available for us. Once we have verified, we have all our line numbers, our article numbers and our descriptions, quantities, unit price and the amounts, we can go ahead and hit Okay. You’ll now see that that invoice is no longer in this queue.

At this point, you can either use the Read Software Connect or our Yoga Connect to send this information over to your, your ECM system. In this case we would be sending it to OnBase. So, we’re going to go ahead and log into OnBase now. We can go to our workflow queue. This document, just because I set up this workflow, I know will go to our invoice exception queue. You can sort through all your invoices by scrolling through them, filtering by entry date. You can enter in filter information if you happen to know a date that you’re particularly looking for. And then you would select that invoice.

So now you will see that this invoice is in our OnBase system. It looks the exact same as it did in our Kofax. And this invoice is ready for approval. So, I’m going to go ahead and hit our submit for approval task. And now this invoice will show up in your ERP system. You can, of course, set this up any way you want. You can have multiple queues. You can have it go to different people. This was just one example of how the system could work for you. Thank you.

So again, that was our Kofax ReadSoft Online, OnBase, and Infor. All three applications working together to automate those invoices for you. And then our last solution would be Kofax TotalAgility. This will also do pretty much the exact same thing as the Kofax RSO. It will capture and classify the document. It would then send them to OnBase for routing and approval. And then once approved it would send the data to your ERP system, and then you could access the OnBase documents through your ERP system or through OnBase. The TotalAgility is a cloud solution. It utilizes an embedded AI to automate more unstructured content, or more types of content. So, you typically will see this with more than just invoices. Forms, cleans, shipping documents, contracts, things along those lines. But of course, like I said, you could definitely use it for the invoices as well.

So, I know we’ve gone through quite a bit. There’s a lot of different pieces of software and tools and modules that you can use. It’s really what’s best for your organization. Do you want a cloud? Do you want software as a service? Do you want something that you’re end users can configure? Are you using Infor? Are you using OnBase? There’s just a lot of different things to consider when looking at setting up an automated invoice process. And we are definitely happy to help you with those.

So, if you have not typed in any questions so far, it looks like I still only see the one from Emily, please free to do that now. Otherwise, I definitely would like to thank everyone for attending today. As I mentioned previously, we do have our 2020 OnBase webinar series, which I’ll show those again here in a moment. If there’s anything you would like to see in a little bit more detail, we are definitely happy to provide that information for you. Or if you think it’s something worthwhile to have an entire webinar on, I’d be happy to create one of those to dig a little bit deeper. It’s just in an hour’s time, there’s only so many things you can go over and I know this is a lot of information.

And actually, we do have a couple more questions so Kirk would like to know, do you have interfaces to Sage? Specifically, SGE500? Kirk, I would have to get back to you on that. The Yoga Capture reuse is an internal RPI software, and that may be something that we could look at. So, we’ll definitely reach out to you on that one. I don’t know the answer off the top of my head, I’m not as familiar with that software.

And then Emily was asking, in order to use these mackerels do we need Unity or Foundation installed? So, Emily, that does depend on the module. For the AP Invoice Approval app, you definitely would need OnBase Foundation. For the Workflow Approval Management, you would definitely need the Unity client because that’s where the configuration is mostly done. But anything else, if you’re just wanting to use the workflow or scanning capture, definitely OnBase version really will work for that. I think it’d be best if we did a discovery of your system to see what you have, and the best way to implement this for you.

Okay. If anyone thinks of any other questions, please feel free to reach out to us. I’m going to go ahead and move on, because I know everybody’s time is valuable. And as I mentioned before, we are happy to provide any type of assessment for you. It is free automation assessments. We can identify enhancement opportunities for your current solution. So, Emily, this might be something to look into. We can definitely identify any opportunities for new solutions, or new departments. And we’d be happy to even look over your licenses, and module inventory, to see if there’s something that maybe you should be using that you’re not, or something you have that you don’t need. Again, in case I did not mention this, it is free. So, if you have any questions, we are happy to take a look at those items for you.

If you do not want to reach out to us, but you just want some additional information, all our previously recorded webinars are on our website. I have done quite a few already for this year, I do them every other Wednesday, so there’s definitely some other information out there about OnBase. And then any of our upcoming webinars are also posted on there, so you can sign up for those. We do have an OnBase knowledge base. And then we do have some information about our OnBase Professional Services as well.

And as I promised, here are our 2020 OnBase webinar series that I told you I’d post again one more time. So please feel free to take a look at these, see if there’s something that you’re interested in attending, or at least sign up for it. Or go and look at the recording once it’s over. So that way, if there’re any questions, you guys are familiar with to date. And then just a little bit of information about RPI. So, you already know a little bit about me. But the company itself, we have over a hundred full time consultants. That does include project managers and architects. We are based in Baltimore, Maryland, but we do have additional offices in Phoenix, Arizona, Tampa, Florida and Kansas City. We do offer technical and professional services. That includes new installations, upgrades, migrations, system designs, staff augmentation, project and change management. We do quite a bit here, so feel free to reach out to us anytime if you need it some assistance.

We are an authorized solution providers, so we are able to provide services and licenses or Perceptive Content, Enterprise Search, Brainware and obvious by Hyland. As I mentioned, I have quite a bit of expertise in the healthcare and the integrations with ERPs and EMR systems. We have tons of experts on site for accounts payable, human resources, higher education. So again, if you’re looking for any help in these areas, please feel free to reach out to us. Other than that, again, I just want to thank everybody for joining. If you have any questions, or need anything else, again, feel free to reach out to us. And other than that, have a great day everyone.