Automate Invoice Entry with Kofax ReadSoft Online

Alex Lindsey:
We are going to be talking about Kofax ReadSoft Online and how to automate your invoice entry. A little bit about your presenter, that is me, Alex Lindsey. I’m a senior solutions architect with RPI Consultants. Been here over five years in the ECM, Kofax, the ERP integration area. I specialize in accounts payable, so if you have AP solution, which ReadSoft Online is, I’m your guy. And we have a small agenda here today. This shouldn’t be too long of a webinar. But, essentially we’re going to touch on what RPI Consultants is, what we offer and we’ll jump into what ReadSoft Online is. We’ll also have a demo and we’ll cover a few of the add-ons, additional features that you may not know about, we’ll close with some summary and some questions. And keep in mind as you’re watching this presentation today, think about how this could potentially fit for your organization. Now, getting into about RPI Consultants, we have over 18 years experience, designing solutions and implementations for a number ERPs and ECMs out there. We have 80+ full time consultants, project managers, technical architects. And we also have offices located in Baltimore, Tampa and Kansas City where we are currently filming from.

A lot of the services we offer, ERP, ECM, advanced data capture or OCR technology. We offer a lot of solutions around those. Technical installs, upgrades, support. Business process analysis and designs. I love to automate things, so a lot of joy I get out of the work is coming in and doing a health check for instance, and taking a look under the hood of your solutions and seeing ways that we can improve it and automate it and make it a little bit more friendly for your end-users. We also offer managed services and remote administration as well. It’s important to note that ReadSoft Online is a Kofax product. We do a lot of Perceptive videos right now, but it’s important to note that we are an authorized reseller and service provider for Kofax products. ReadSoft Online rolls up under that umbrella. I know there’s been a lot of changes in the industry, so it’s just important to note that. We also do a lot of development optimization, process designs, form design as well. So Kofax Services, we’ve got you covered if you need it.

Jumping into what ReadSoft Online is. ReadSoft Online is essentially a cloud-based invoice OCR solution. It’s got a few more aspects to it, but it essentially will integrate with your ERP and your ECM. Kind of serve as a great front-end for your account payable solution. So a little bit about it, again it’s cloud-based so it is a Software as a Service. It’s a subscription that you’d pay, essentially. There are service costs associated with just setting it up. They are fairly minimal.

It’s got a nice HTML5 user face, so I don’t know if you’ve seen other OCR technologies or demos, but this one’s got a very clean interface. It’s very intuitive to work with. It is used for only invoice OCR, so that’s something to keep in mind as well. Other OCR technologies, for instance, Brainware, can be leveraged for like a transcript solution or maybe something else that you can custom built out to OCR different things. This is primarily just for invoices. It handles document verification, like a lot of OCR technologies do. It will verify data on the documents. It’s also got modules for approvals and GL Coding. That is a feature that is pretty unique to this products. It’s something that you don’t see in a lot of other OCR technologies. It’s also got a lot of out of the box ERP and ECM integration so you can basically front-end this and plug it in to any system you want to.

It handles all kinds of file types as well. PDF, Word, Tif, and I think Excel is the most recent version, format that you can bring in. So in this feature deep dive, keep in mind, like will this work for my accounts payable solution? Will this work in my department? And maybe think creatively about of how you could potentially use ReadSoft Online in your current system. So it’s great as a front-end OCR with your ECM or ERP. Particularly if you have pretty advanced approval process, so if for instance, if you have purchase order approvals and it’s a certain service PO and it needs to go to this person first before it goes through some tier hierarchy, that’s a fairly advanced approval process and may not be a great fit, so it’s better to use ReadSoft Online as a front end OCR, get information off the invoice and then plug it directly into your ERP or ECM to handle those more complex approvals and exception handling.

If you have a fairly standard data structure as well, that’s not really a pre-qualifier essentially. The important thing to note here is that it is a cloud-based solution. So around that you know, you’ve only got a box that you can work within. It is flexible to an extent, but if there are other advanced data structure elements, additional look-ups and things like that, that you’d like to work with, we generally push it to do those within your ECM or ERP. If you have straight forward approval process, so the inverse of what I mentioned earlier. If you have a fairly linear process where it needs to go to Jane Doe to approve up to $5,000 and after that it needs to go Sue Smith who can approve up to $10,000, it’s fairly linear like that.

It’s a great tool to do a lot of your approvals. It also handles general ledger coding. Again, this is great feature. I love this about the product is that you can handle. So other technologies for instance, they OCR and they validate and it’s great for purchase orders. And this one is as well, but you can’t really handle GL coding. You have to push that into your ERP directly or handle it through a Perceptive Content or OnBase. You can do that all within the system here as well.

Again, all this bounces up against your ERP data so anything that’s being OCR’d is being bounced against your data to make sure that it’s valid. It’s also got a feedback request for vendor and PO updates. So as part of your subscription, you don’t really have a ton of access to modify the things that you need to so. One good example of this is if you have a particular vendor, Acme Corp. for instance and they change their invoice structure and invoice number is now on the left side of the page instead of the right side of the page. There’s a great feature within ReadSoft Online to where you can basically plug in this input and say hey, for this vendor, please modify this to pull the invoice date from this area instead of this area where it was before.

So all those pre-qualifiers are fine, but it really just seeing how it works in action. This chart here kind of shows just the general flow. If we were to deploy ReadSoft Online for you guys, we’d basically set up a method of capture first, right. So with ReadSoft Online, you can get your own email account. You can set up multiple in boxes as well to capture documents into the OCR engine. You can also scan and import. It’s important to note with scan so, some of you may be very familiar with like a Perceptive Content where you can scan directly in to Perceptive Content. This would work a little bit differently.

So you could still use a desktop scanner or a multi-function printer and scan those in, but you would drop into a shared folder directory and then an import agent or import service would bring those invoices into the cloud, if you will, to perform the invoice extraction and verification. So once it gets up there, the engine’s going to read off the invoice itself, it’s going to extract as much data as it can. It’s going to try to get your vendor information, your invoice header information, your PO line details and try to pair those off and it’s going to match that up against your vendor master and your PO master. Once it does that, it’s basically going to say is this accurate. Am I confident enough in these values to push it forward? If it is, then it will move it forward into an approval process, if you guys have that set up, if not it’ll go directly to your ERP or ECM. If it’s not, it’s going to stop for verification.

At that point, that’s when a user will basically log on, they just follow the URL. Go in there and identify basically, they’d have a list of invoicing. You’ll see it in the demo, so. And they’ll modify whatever key values they need to. It’s pretty clear what needs to be changed or modified on the invoice metadata versus what’s green and good to go. So after you verify it, it’s going to move forward to approval processing. You can implement the GL coding function within this process as well, which is a nice feature. If it doesn’t require any kind of approvals, it’s then going to be exported out, so there’s an API for data export, be in XML. There’s another slide later on, like we’ll go into more detail about the integrations with, but essentially it would just get pushed out from there. So now we’re going to watch just a short demo video of the product in action.

Hello and welcome to a very short demonstration of ReadSoft Online. You’ll notice here that I’m in a standard browser. I’m also logged in as a Clerk 1 user. Few tabs to call out here. An upload tab, where you can upload individual invoices for processing if need to. Verify, which is where users will go in and validate data on the invoices, if needed. Approve, if there’s any type of approval process that this user needs to perform. Explore and storage, so if you have invoices that you’re storing within the system itself, you can retrieve those there. We’re going to go ahead and go to verify. This is going to pull up a list of invoices that basically need manual intervention of some sort, so data elements that are incorrect or values that need to be updated, you can click start here to start at the top or you can just click on an individual invoice itself.

In the list here, we have a standard viewer so you can see the image itself. You can rotate the document, fit to screen, minimize, zoom in, if needed. You can also see additional pages here on the left hand pane. What we’re really going to be looking at here is the data elements that have been extracted off of it. So you can notice that we got the correct buyer, supplier, supplier number, a few things that are wrong though, are the invoice date, for instance. [inaudible 00:10:36] obviously been future dated. But for our purposes, let’s go ahead and put in a date that fits within the range. You notice here that these rules can be adjusted as well so you’re not paying anything that’s, for instance, three years old. Also note that the amounts are incorrect. The invoice is a little confusing. There’s a sub-total of 1,550, but total amount due of 1,575. In this instance here, they could tab out because we know that net amount is correct. On the tax amount, we’re going to go ahead and call that $25.00, and call it good for the day. And delivery cost, we add no delivery cost to this, so I’ll tab out of that as well. You’ll see here it says on certain value not quite sure, tab out.

You notice here also that the OK button has been enabled once you verify all the valid data points here. A few of the tabs caught before we verify this invoice is information, which has pertinent properties for the document itself. Attachment, so say for instance this is a PO invoice and you have good received document, add that here as well for reader storage. Comments, so if you know this is going to an approver downstream, you can leave a comment to further review or update the purchase order or something like that. And history, which will come into play later, when we log on as the approver. You can see here the document’s created, make sure action process took place and then once we click okay here, it’ll be updated with the fact that it was verified by the Clerk 1 user. Go ahead and click OK. It took you back to the screen.

We’ll log off and log on as one of the approvers now, so you can see that demonstration. In this instance, the first approver, Approver 1, will be doing the GL coding as well. You’ll notice that their tabs look a little bit different as well. They’re only responsible for the appropriate approving and have the ability to retrieve documents. We’re going to pick one of these invoices here. This is a non-PO invoice. We obviously don’t have purchase order associated with it. We’ve got the same tabs here and if you pull up the history you can see that the document was verified by Clerk 1. Now we need to add some GL coding. You’ll also notice here we kind of have a general rule non-PO greater than $1,000, go to the first approver, then it’ll go to the second approver. We have our GL coding here. We also have type ahead function so you can pull up, for instance, travel expenses. If you need to add a second line, so let’s say we need to split the cost of this invoice and assign it to a different account, we can do that as well and assign it to any different GL account.

Once these amounts balance out, the invoices [inaudible 00:13:23] distributed, then click approve this invoice, you’ll notice a dropdown, we have all must approve and it went on to the second level approver. Hope this gives you a little bit more insight into the products, now we’ll continue on with the presentation, thank you.

All right, hope that kind of gave you a general idea of ReadSoft Online works, what it’s going to look like to your end users to basically process invoices through [inaudible 00:13:55] extractions and exception handling. One thing not shown in that video is the PO line pairing. We work with a lot of OCR technologies around here and I would say that the invoice line pairing of purchase order invoices is exceptional within this. Essentially it’s a click and drag over the lines themselves to extract and map back to the data limits that you need to push out. We can definitely do a demo of that for you off this call if you’d like, I’ll mention that again later, but essentially, how is this going to integrate into your existing system, your ERP, your PeopleSoft, your Lawson, your OnBase, your Perceptive Content, things like that. So there are a number of pre-built ReadSoft Online integrations. These are just basically just out of the box pieces here. Microsoft Dynamic AX, Great Plains. That’s who you guys compete with.

QuickBooks is also on there, so if you are a small organization, this is actually a fairly viable option for you guys to basically roll in our invoice OCR solution. We also have our own connectors so, we, on the ISDS side of RPI work with tons and tons of different ERPs who’ve got great knowledge on all the Infor APIA, PeopleSoft, Oracle, EDS, Perceptive, OnBase, Kofax, JD Edwards, you can list them all. And if that, for some reason doesn’t work, you have some other application, XML or web services work as well as a general file export, which, if you’re a Perceptive user and have an AP solution, you may be familiar with. Essentially we can work around what your ERP requires if you need customizations as part of that. We do that as well so if you need to incorporate some other data element or do some kind of DSM lookup to add to the file before we push, we can do that.

So to cover a few add-ons and features, the line item extraction and line pairing essentially is an add-on of this solution. It’s a minimal fee, honestly to be able to do that. As well as a general ledger coding and approval. These are both great features within the product itself. They work really well. I’ve been impressed with it and all the work that I’ve done with it so far. It’s also got a reporting analytics component as well so you can see basically a dashboard of what’s been processed, kind of what’s in flight. It’s going to give you an account of what’s happening there. It’s also going document archival features. So if you don’t have an ACM solution, but you still want to store your invoice documents, you can do that within ReadSoft Online as well, so you can later retrieve them. You can also attach documents to those invoices as well, so basically like a goods received document, he mentioned that in the demo, to store there as well. And also has multiple language support. So English, obviously, French, German, Portuguese. It’s got a number of languages. We can send you a full list if you like at the end of this meeting if you have a specific request, we can give you a full list of all the supported languages at ReadSoft Online.

And to kind of close in summary. It’s a great option, it really is. We work with a lot of OCR technologies, like I mentioned before. ReadSoft Online kind of hits a market that I think is unique because of a lot of these reasons, really. I’ll highlight first and foremost, it is scalable. So because it is a lower cost implementation, there’s a lower cost license, but that by no means, means that it isn’t a scalable solution. It’s highly scalable. There are customers using ReadSoft Online that are processing thousands and thousands of invoices a month on this solution. Like I mentioned, it is a low-cost implementation to support in maintenance, which essentially, you know, means that you’re going to get a much quicker ROI. The solution was built to be a quick, plug and play, hey just start sending your invoices into OCR and start getting your return on investment much more quickly. From everything that we’ve seen on it, it does exactly that. The users interface is clean. It is intuitive like you saw in the demo. If you have experience with other OCR technologies, this one kind of comes out looking more polished, I would say. It’s got great out of the box integrations. Again, it again, meant to be plug and play OCR technology.

There are some customizations that may be required for integration, so as I mentioned on the previous slide, you may have to manipulate some data, but again, there’s not a lot of effort that goes into that as well. Again, one of the considerations is if you do have complex approvals or exception handling, let’s keep that within your ECM or your ERP product, as opposed to trying to build it out. And I only say that, because not saying you can’t build it out with ReadSoft Online, it’s more of a situation where you wouldn’t necessarily want to maintain that.

So in closing, that is ReadSoft Online. Do we have any questions from the room?

Speaker 3:
Yeah, Alex. Thank you. We do have a few questions. Starting with, first question. Does this product only do invoices?

Alex Lindsey:
Correct. It only does invoice documents. It’s kind of a draw, it’s the niche, it’s the direction that ReadSoft went with this product because they were able to focus on that, it works extremely well.

Speaker 3:
When in the approval screen, what is the repository? I assume that’s [crosstalk 00:19:19] around the image.

Alex Lindsey:
Yeah, it’s basically the image. So the repository, more or less is where the document is stored. If you have that enabled, you can basically store the document there.

Speaker 3:
So I think one thing we sort of touched on as an add-on, is the ability to retain those documents indefinitely.

Alex Lindsey:
Yes, that is…

Speaker 3:
Otherwise, they are removed from the ReadSoft service.

Alex Lindsey:
ReadSoft service. If you have an ACM product that you’d like to push the image over to some other place or within your ERP, you can do that, but yeah, essentially ReadSoft Online does offer that ability for you to archive those documents there.

Speaker 3:
Sort of a two part question and that we may have touched on this but, what are our capture options?

Alex Lindsey:
Capture options, sure. I say the most prevalent is email. They do set up … They’ll setup in boxes for you to essentially email your documents in, so that could be a situation where you just tell your vendor, send your invoice documents to this email address and that’ll just kick the process off automatically. Or you may want to have more control over it and have an in box that your team monitors and you email it in. But you can also import the documents, so if you have a directory somewhere, a shared folder directory, you can configure ReadSoft Online to basically just pick those documents up from there. So scanning is also an option, because you can scan to a shared folder/directory and have ReadSoft Online pick those up as well.

Speaker 3:
And the second part of that question I think you answered, but it was, does your system allow vendors to upload invoices or is it only internal.

Alex Lindsey:
No, again, it’s more of a tell us where you want to get your documents from, and we can configure it to basically pull from there. So I think you’ve got good options when it comes to that. So, if you want to be more hands-off what we try to do with a lot of accounts payable solutions, what we encourage our customers to do, is to streamline that invoice capture. If you have a front-end OCR that leads into a Perceptive Content, for instance, don’t create another stop gap for your end-users or accounts payable department, just tell your vendors and it sometimes takes a little training with your vendor set, but if you can get your vendors to start sending invoices in to one spot without you having to monitor it constantly, it makes it a little bit easier for your AP clerks.

Speaker 3:
Okay, next question is what is the average time for implementation.

Alex Lindsey:
The average time for implementation. So again, if have experience with other OCR technologies, it could be months and months and months. This is more of a weeks turn around, I would say. If we had to spitball it, six weeks potentially, probably less. Honestly, it’s very, because it is a cloud-based solution, because it does fit within a specific box not a super rigid box, like I said before, there’s some things you can do.

If we were to deploy this for instance, this might be the best example. From the beginning you get your subscription started, they create your account. We would ask for your vendor data, your purchase order data, your GL accounting data, all the things that you want to incorporate in that, so we can validate your vendor sets, essentially. Your vendor invoices against that information. We would then basically do some training on the solution. It’s a lot easier to do with ReadSoft Online. And then essentially you’d go through a UAT phase. Unit testing and then a go-live hand off. So essentially we’d just say, hey just start sending your invoices here and we can point to your ERP. I would say the biggest part of any implementation with ReadSoft Online is going to be your integration, right. So you, depending on your ERP, there could be certain functions that we just need to tweak and just make sure, just right, so we can push your invoice data in without you having to handle a ton of errors in your ERP. Or even simpler, if you have an ACM on Perceptive Content or On Base, a lot of that stuff can be handled within those systems, so essentially we would just do the hand off to that ECM product.

I hope that answers your question. It’s kind of a long-winded answer for something, but our experience is it’s a much quicker implementation. I’m a big fan of that. I don’t like to draw things out, so.

Speaker 3:
All right, thank you Alex. That is all the questions we have. If you have any more feel free to get them in now as we wrap up or you can shoot them our way afterwards.

Alex Lindsey:
Yep. Thank you again for attending our Webinar Wednesday. We do have additional webinars if you are Infor Lawson customer, please visit RPIT.com/webinars. We will also be doing another webinar series first Wednesday of every month, so stay tuned for that. We’ll send out some notifications as well. Again, as kind of a housekeeping item, we’ll be sending out the slide deck, this video in all its glory will be posted to YouTube after a little bit of editing. If you have any questions about ReadSoft Online, or if you’d actually like to see a more in-depth demo, we could even pull in some of your vendor invoices and bounce it against some of your vendor data, we have the ability to do a demo like that if you like. Please reach out to us at RPIC.com or just give us a call. Thank you guys very much.