How Integrated Invoice Imaging Works for Oracle Cloud Implementations

The integrated invoice imaging solution for Oracle Cloud provides scanned image import, intelligent character recognition, and automatic invoice creation. In addition, the solution routes invoices with exceptions to accounts payables personnel for review and completion.

This figure shows the integrated invoice imaging flow.

Here's a summary of the steps in the imaging process followed by details of the processing flow.

1. To use the integrated invoice imaging solution, you must have a designated email to send the invoice images. You get one when you sign up for the Oracle Cloud Application Service.

2. After you have the email, prepare the invoices for processing.

   • If your business process is to receive invoice images from your suppliers, communicate to them your imaging requirements. The suppliers can then send the invoice images directly to the designated email.

   • If you receive paper invoices, prepare images from the invoices and send the images to the email.

3. After you send the images to the email account, the imaging solution retrieves them for further processing. The solution checks for new images every minute and creates invoices from the images.

4. If any exceptions occur during automatic invoice creation, the solution marks the invoices as incomplete. It then routes the incomplete invoices to the accounts payable personnel for review and completion. The incomplete invoices appear in the Scanned information tile on the Invoices landing page.

5. After finishing the rest of the invoice processing tasks, such as validation and approval, the invoices are ready for payment.

Email Scanned Images

Based on agreements with your suppliers, you might receive paper invoices at your bill-to locations, or you might receive images by email. You can communicate imaging requirements to your suppliers, such as to send images in the TIFF format with a minimum of 300 dpi.

Imaging specialists can check for quality and proper formatting for images sent by email. Imaging specialists can also sort the paper invoices into different categories based on these parameters:

• Geography
• Invoice type
• Invoice amount
• Due date

They can then scan the invoices to convert them to images.

Imaging specialists forward the images to the designated email. They can optionally specify attributes in the email subject for the purposes of routing and recording.

Import Images

Oracle Imaging retrieves the images from the designated email at scheduled intervals. It groups all invoice images in an email into a batch.

Recognize Images

The imaging solution then sends the batches for intelligent data recognition and extraction of the invoice attributes.

Oracle's Imaging Solution offers cutting-edge intelligent recognition capabilities for extracting the invoice attributes from the scanned images. Unlike other solutions that use supplier-specific templates to extract information, Oracle's Imaging Solution can intelligently locate data within the invoice. Imaging Solution finds the data regardless of its location on the image and whether it has processed invoices from that supplier before. As you add suppliers, or an existing supplier changes its invoice layout, Imaging can extract the attributes from the new invoice layouts.

Store Images

Oracle Imaging stores the invoice images and extracted information. For the rest of the invoice life cycle, any reference to the invoice image points to the imaging repository. This ensures that documents don't undergo replication again during invoice processing.

Process Invoices

The imaging solution uses the extracted attributes from the images to create the invoices. If exceptions occur during processing, it marks the invoices as incomplete. It then uses Oracle Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) workflows to route the incomplete invoices to the accounts payable personnel. A default routing rule routes the incomplete invoices to all users who are assigned the View Scanned Payables Invoice (AP_VIEW_SCANNED_PAYABLES_INVOICES_PRIV_OBI) privilege. To update incomplete invoices, users must also have the Edit Payables Invoice (AP_EDIT_PAYABLES_INVOICE_PRIV) or Create Payables Invoice (AP_CREATE_PAYABLES_INVOICE_PRIV) privileges.

Incomplete invoices appear in the Scanned information tile on the Invoices landing page. Edit Invoice page highlights invoice header attributes and lines requiring attention so that you can quickly identify and resolve them. With a dual monitor setup, you can review both the invoice and the invoice image at the same time.

Oracle Imaging provides an image viewer embedded within Oracle Fusion Payables. Accounts payable personnel can review the images using the embedded image viewer.

This figure shows the Scanned information tile on the Invoices landing page.

Pay Invoices

After you complete the rest of the invoice processing tasks, such as validating, approving, and accounting, the invoices are ready for payment. You can schedule a payment process request to select them for payment.