How to Process Invoices Intelligently With AI
AI is the Way - Processing Invoices Intelligently
Bills. We get them all the time and its pretty important that we pay them before the deadline else things tend to stop working. But we also get quite a lot of these little pieces of paper don't we? And that means we have to log, categorise and pay them to ensure that we don't upset our loyal suppliers, ensuring that we keep our company running smoothly. So wouldn't it be nice if that just happened and we didn't have to think about it anymore? Isn't that what AI is all about after all? Well, if that sounds like something you'd be interested in, this might just be the best blog you read all day….
Because Yes! Microsoft can help you to achieve this aim! They offer a wide range of AI products that can use used to fit the needs of your business, however one of their AI models is specifically built to handle this very scenario. All you need to do it feed the model a picture of your invoice and it will go away, read the document, categorise the information and return it to you in a neat package of information that tells you all you need to know about the document.
So what is the catch? Well, the only thing you really need to do here is work out how to pass the document to the AI model and how to consume the information that the model returns to you - other than that, there really isn't much more you need to do. The model has been "trained" by Microsoft, who continue to maintain and support it, so the AI side of things is completely handled.
Now that we know we don't need to know anything about AI to use this functionality, the only thing we really need to consider is how we are going to pass the information to the model. Below are three solutions that we can use to achieve the desired result - obviously the correct answer here depends on lots of different variables, but this at least provides some food for thought about how you might be able to use this AI model:
- Enhance Existing System
This is likely your ideal solution - although this will require that there is something in your existing system that enables you to connect a third party solution. The AI models that Microsoft make available can all be called via an API and the only real requirement is that you can make and receive these calls. This is fairly standard functionality for a modern application, so it's likely this is available, but if not you'd need to consider one of the below.
- Hybrid Solution using Power Automate
Power Automate is a Microsoft tool that enables you to schedule and automate various different processes. In this scenario, you might set up a Power Automate process that monitors a specific mailbox and picks up anything that has an invoice attached. From there it would be very easy to kick off one of the AI models and receive the information back about the invoice - you could perhaps store the information somewhere an email it out as an excel file at the end of the day, however you want to receive the information really!
- New System
At Dolphin, we use our own Business Process Management system to consume the files and convert them using the AI model. This solution is called Webcon, and it gives you a huge suite of functionality that we'd be more than happy to show you if you're interested!
