Category: Document Capture

I’ve been doing some work with a client recently, helping them implement Document capture (DC) from Continia Software. One of the queries which cam eup, was how to add a prefix onto a purchase order number.

The issue was that they were sending purchase orders out with a company specific prefix (e.g. FAB- for Fabrikam, Inc. or CRO- for Cronus UK, Ltd.), but when the invoice came in, the supplier was not including the prefix so the invoices were not matching up with the receipts.

I did a little experimenting and came up with a solution of the client which both worked and was easy for them to maintain in future. We did this by adding two new fields (PO Prefix and PO Number Without Prefix) and changing the standard Our Order No. field to have a formula where the two new fields were concatenated.

The example below is one I have mocked up, rather than using screenshots from the clients system. In this example, the new PO Number field has a Formula set to 'PO' (on the client’s system this would have been something like 'FAB-') and set to not required and not to search for the value:

Continue reading “Add Missing Prefix to Purchase Order Number in Continia Software’s Document Capture”

I was doing some work with a client implementing Document Capture (DC) from Continia Software. This is an extension for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central which allows PDF invoices to be scanned and (optionally) matched against purchase orders and/or receipts. I provided some training to clients on doing the setup of vendor templates and let them get on with creating the required templates.

However, they brought one to me as they could not get the invoice line fields to recognise. The issue was down to it being an invoice from a mobile phone (cellnet for any Americans reading) company where the header (and footer) fields were on the first page and all of the lines on the second page.

I did some digging and found that two of the footer fields, Amount Incl. VAT and VAT Amount, needed a setting changed. These fields are set up with the Stop Lines Recognition set to If Caption or Value is on same line. As these fields were on the first page and the lines on the second page, there setting on the Stop Lines Recognition meant that DC found these fields and stopped looking for lines.

I changed the setting on both fields to a blank:

The Amount Excl. VAT field is also set the same way, but there was a subtotal below the lines so I was able to use this field as the footer to stop recognising lines; which was necessary as there was an additional four pages on the invoice, none of which needed to be recognised.

I was doing some work for a client helping them implement Continia Software’s Document Management solution; this is a widely used extension for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central which scans invoices, and other documents, and uses OCR (Object Character Recognition) to match the scanned invoice with the Business Central transaction.

While preparing for a training session, I discovered that one of the supplier invoices was not being read correctly; there was an Product Code heading followed by rows of item numbers, below which was the payment terms just outside of the lines table which was being picked up as an item number.

Fortunately, Document Capture allows you to add Rules to fields with which we could stop it reading the payment terms.

The item numbers in this case all followed a pattern which was fairly similar. Below are examples of the two formats of item number used by the supplier:

• AA1 – two letters followed by up to three numbers.
• AA1A – two letters followed by up to three numbers followed by a letter.

The rules allowed by Document Capture use regular expressions (commonly shortened to “regex”), which are a sequence of characters which specifies a match pattern in text.

The regex required for this supplier invoice is as below:

[A-Z]{2}[0-9]{1,2,3}[A-Z]{0,1,2}

To break this down:

• [A-Z]{2} – two alpha characters.
• [0-9]{1,2,3} – between 1 and 3 digits.
• [A-Z]{0,1,2} – none or between 1 and 2 alpha characters..

Once we put the rule in place and clicked Recognise Fields button on the action bar, the invoice was correctly read and the payment terms were no longer read as items.

As I say, I am not a regex expert and while the above does work, I’d be happy if anyone has any suggestions to make it more efficient.

Since I started working with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central last year, I’ve also been learning some of the add-ons which are commonly used. One of those add-ons is Document Capture from Continia Software.

They seem pretty well organised and have a Continia Learn which is very much along the same lines as Microsoft Learn; you can also do an exam for each of their products which results in a credential which you can register with Credly.

I passed the one for the Document Capture product earlier today: