Automate AP with NetSuite Bill Capture

00:06All righty. Well, let's get started here today. Thank you to everyone who's joined so far. We hope that uh these summer series events will provide you guys with some some extra tools in the tool belt to see see what else is out there on NetSuite. All right, just a quick intro to the Luxent summer series. So, we had our first of our summer series back in June. Um, and we are excited to have a handful of other other webinars coming down the pipeline here. We're going to do a a demonstration of NetSuite's account reconciliation in July, NetSuite's warehouse management in August, and then some of the features and functionality that NetSuite has around AI in September.

00:49So, for our agenda today, we're going to um go through some of the common EP challenges, kind of set the stage for bill capture, learn a little bit about how bill capture works and what that process looks like. Heather will pop us into a live demo, and then we'll close it out with some questions and answers um from the crowd. Just a background on Heather if you haven't had haven't had the delight of working with her as of yet. Um, Heather comes to us with 30 plus years of of ERP experience and has been very beneficial to to all of our, you know, customers that have worked with her.

01:24Some of the industries that she has that expertise in our software, professional services, wholesale, distribution, construction, gas and oil, nonprofit, and that's just to name a few. So, needless needless to say, very experienced and qualified um to be working with you guys. All right, with that, Heather, I will pass it to you to to talk through some of the AP challenges. Okay, common accounts payable challenges. Uh there is the of course manual data entry for the AP department keying in the vendor bills.

01:58Uh approval process is uh slow maybe because they're actually handing around those bills to get the manual bills to get signed and approved. uh you could get duplicate invoices and you have limited visibility to those bills while they're passing them around. So uh it that's normal AP challenges uh that doesn't take into consideration if you're already using a vendor bill approval process in NetSuite which uh bill capture does work with. Okay. What is bill capture?

02:34Bill capture is NetSuite's uh module that takes a scanned image of a vendor bill and it automatates creation of it into um into a NetSuite record for a bill. So that invoice is scanned using OCR and AI. So it kind of learns as it goes and it remembers things from each time it works with that same vendor and that type of bill. It remembers things and tries to make it easier each time using AI. Uh it uh suggests the values based on historical invoice.

03:19It also works in conjunctation with uh NetSuite 3M match. So it will go through the all the three-way match uh process if you have that configured. It will also support uh approval routing whether you're using suite approvals or a vendor bill approval workflow. It will work with either. There are some limitations to uh the bill capture. One of the limitations is that it only can read uh US bills in in in dollars.

03:57So if you have uh a small amount of bills in foreign currency, you could enter those manually, but you could still use bill capture for the US dollar invoices. It does recognize different types of formats being a PDF, a JPEG or a PNG file. The PDF format can be up to 30 pages for one invoice. Uh the JPEG and PNG have a one-page limit. There is uh the limitation one bill per file. So you don't put a whole stack of bills on the scanner and scan them into one file.

04:34NetSuite is not able to parse that out because it's actually going to store those with the vendor bill. So that's why it wants them to each be a separate file. The upload uh files cannot exceed 8 megabytes. You can upload multiple files at a time. So you could uh highlight a whole group of files, take them to the drop zone, and NetSuite will process that whole group of files at once. Yeah, maybe you drop them and then go get a cup of coffee.

05:09So that uh works really nice that you don't have to take them one by one. for they documents can be emailed into NetSuite and it will take up to 20 attached files with that email as long as each file does not exceed 10 megabyte and the overall email does not exceed 10. Email notification replies are not sent if it contains a virus or there's no bill. So, it's not going to tell you if there was nothing there on the uh review scan bill page.

05:44This is one of the uh screens in NetSuite that is not customizable at this time. The process for uh the scanned bills and bill captures is that you either have uh an email that emails in the uh with an attached copy of an invoice or you drag and drop the invoices to the drop zone on the scan bill page. Once you've that has occurred, the NetSuite will process those bills by first doing the OCR and the AI intelligence and it will come up with its recommendations of how the fields should be filled out.

06:32Then there's a review step where the there is the manual intervention where you do need to review what NetSuite has come up with and you click the button that says create bill. Once you've created that bill, it goes through the PO and receipt matching rules to make sure that if you have a variance between the bill and uh the receipt, it will flag it uh for approval and then can actually post that journal that difference for that transaction.

07:10If you have approval routing turned on, the vendor bill will go in pending approval. Whereas then it will go through whatever approval routing that you have set up in NetSuite. Or if you don't have anything set up, this would be an opportune time to think about setting it up if that's something you would like to have. All right. Now, the fun part is the demonstration so that I can show you how it works because I thought it was kind of cool. All right, so I'm going to go to transactions payables, scanned vendor bills.

07:51So, this is like your homepage where you're going to see the bills that have been either emailed in or scanned. Here is that drop zone. This is just like the drop zone if you have file drag and drop turned on. Very similar. This is the a similar type of drop zone where you can drop those bills in. The bottom half of the screen shows you the bills that have already come in. If they say review, they have not created a vendor bill. If they say view, that means the vendor bill has already been created.

08:20But you can still look at it here and see the vendor bill along with the scanned invoice. So taking our first bill, I am dropping it in the drop zone. Clicking on upload file and we can see that it is now doing OCR process. I will click refresh. All right. Now it is ready for review. I click on the review button and now we will see the invoice on the left side of the pane and we will see the what NetSuite has brought in on the right side of the pane.

09:02It's interesting. So you can see in the PO number field I'm going to click this little toggle so it'll show you. It'll highlight the field. It says this is where it found the PO and we know that it says customer PO. So that looks correct. reference number. If we click on that, it's highlighting up here that it found it under the invoice number. Perfect. Payment terms. Uh, it did not find it there. So, it Oh, it did find net30, but it didn't find the 2%. So, uh, if you wanted the 2% net30, you could change that.

09:41Uh, but we don't have that term. So, it picked the closest one it had. Uh, you can see that it picked the vendor. It picked GM lighting. Uh, it has the invoice date and I can highlight it. It found the date. Now, this one does have related purchase order. So, this invoice has items on it. So, you can see that it brought in all the items and it is matching them up with the rate and the amount extended. It knows which PO number they're related to.

10:19From the PO, it knows the location was US1. And you can see at the top that the scanned amount was 136.90. You can verify that's the total of the bill that was calculated. So everything on this bill looks pretty good. So we can have it create the bill. Now, it's an old transaction date, so it's going to follow whatever rules you have set up in NetSuite. So, if you have the period closed, it would go in the first open period, just like a normal vendor bill. All right, while we're waiting for that, I am going to send an email and to NetSuite with the next bill, and we'll review that one as soon as we looked at the vendor bill.

11:09All right, it's successfully created our bill. So, it's here's our vendor bill. It is pending approval because we have approval routing turned on, but it has copied everything over onto the vendor bill from from that from that invoice. So, everything's on here just as you would expect, the same 136.90 with the same items. Now, if you had custom fields, anything else that you needed to add to your vendor bill, you still have this opportunity.

11:45You can click edit and add anything on to the vendor bill that anything additional that you might need. Uh on the um scan bills, you could have added the department and class. So, it would have pulled that across or if that is on the purchase order, it will pull it across from the purchase order. So, I'm going to go back to scan vendor bill screens. So, now you can see I have a new bill, Nora Lighting, that it came in from an email. And so, we can review that one.

12:22So, that one I just emailed in. there is a specific uh email address for your account that uh when you configure it, the system sets up and then you can email them into that email address. So again, this is a scan bill. It's two pages on this bill. It went to the second page. On that second page, there is freight. So on the expense tab, it actually added shipping cost for 1919, which is the freight. On the items tab, we have our items that it added.

13:03So it knows that there was 3, three, and one for the quantities. It's got the cost of 1150, 620, 35,65. It's extended it. It knows it's related to PO 20646 and it has the location which came off the PO. So that vendor bill is done. We can create the bill. So that's how it successfully read a nice two-page vendor bill.

13:36and it adds uh freight, it will add tax as those typically are not things that you put on your PO. Uh there is uh some preferences that you can either say you want tax and freight to either be an item or a GL account. So you can make that choice if you're using items instead. So here's our vendor bill. It brought everything over. It's pending approval. So edit. So that one is done and we're off to bring in another bill.

14:17So I am going to bring in this bill and upload file. All right, it is OCR reading right now. This one will be the really fun one. This is one that I was really surprised on how well OCR has become over the years. Uh back in the old days, uh it it certainly couldn't have just found stuff on the on the vendor bills in the old days. So, I found this really exciting. This is an image of Bill.

14:54You can see I didn't even have it flat on the desk. You can also see that it's sideways. Uh, it didn't have a PO, but it found the vendor, it found the date, it found the dollar amount, and it knows that it needs uh needs an account number. I'll go down to a get the account. And it's got the account, it's got the amount.

15:32Probably wouldn't use a location cuz this is an expense. Not required. You could put in a reference number. Um, whatever the account number was on the bill, 654 581, whatever. And then you can create the bill. But I I found it really exciting that even if your vendors send you a copy of uh They took I took a picture with my phone. So, this is off the phone and it's sideways and it still was able to scan all the information off this bill.

16:11So, pretty cool. Uh, and then again, I can create the bill, but I'm not going to do that on this one cuz that takes just a little bit of time. But it's just going to do it just like the others. I want to make sure we have time for this bill. This bill This bill I did set up with three-way match so that you could see a little bit of how the three-way match would do. Click refresh processing. All right.

16:50So on this bill, it did read the PO number. It does know the vendor. It knows all the information. It pulled it pulled the terms right now. It pulled the closest it could to the terms. So, you can see that it actually read the real terms, but it said, "Well, I don't really have that, so I'm going to put the the the net 30." So, it came close. It did as close as it could based on what was in uh the NetSuite instance. Uh, this one has freight. So, it added the $20 freight. It added the items.

17:29So, it added the items. It knows that it's with this PO. Now, I will tell you that on this PO that um the amount for this was not $6. So, when we get it over into the make creating a a vendor bill, it's going to have an amount difference. So, I made the amount difference more than $15 so that you could see a little bit of what three-way match does and doesn't do or and it's very configurable. So, there's a big workflow with uh lots of searches and you can turn features on and off to uh fit your needs of what you want it to do.

18:13So we are going to create this bill and we do know that it's pending approval. We can click on this bill exception button and it's telling me uh that it the terms don't match. Now it's saying there's no matching PO and I think that's because it's not approved yet because once that this bill is approved then it's going to tell us we have an amount difference because it definitely found the PO. So, it's just not in the correct status for that yet. But on the line level itself, if it had a variance, it uh would show that there was a variance with journal not posted.

18:55But because we have the three-way match turned on, you also have a link to the receipt. So, that's how it's doing that variances. But uh the three-way match has uh multiple layers of that process. There is additional approvals. So if something doesn't match, you could require additional approvals. It can also post the variance journal entries. So if we had a variance on it, it would post that journal entry. it could post that for you so that your uh receive not invoiced or purchase acral whatever you call that account uh so that it helps keep that account in balance so you're not doing as much manually uh so if I go to transactions payables and I can go to approve bills there's my kitler [Music] submit it.

20:06So, it could be going through multiple approvals because of that uh three-way match. So, now that if I go back to that bill, I have to go back a couple times. It's still pending approval. Uh but it's still finding that discrepancy on the terms. So that's what it's requiring additional approval for right now. So that's why it's still pending approval. It's still going to want that additional approval based on whatever the three-way match workflow is configured.

20:47You might uh just want a warning for the terms difference. But then again, you might want a hard approval, especially for an amount difference. I can still mark it approved. And now my bill's approved. But it still tells me that I'm linked.

21:26So that's the really nice part of this. And if I did have a variance. So it's saying that I received it at the same cost. So we're going to look at that receipt and I did receive it at the same cost. So this one also says there's no variance. So, I've turned on that field as well, but you could see it on the item receipt. All right, I think that gives you a good enough idea of the demo. Great. Thank you so much, Heather.

22:03That was awesome. And um we'll pass it back to me. Thank you. As uh Heather switches things over here, I just wanted to walk through some of the packaging um and how bill capture is broken down. So, you have four different tier levels of how bill capture is broken down. And it's based on the number of scanned files per month. So, that's definitely something that's good for you to have an understanding of before we move into the process of of um getting any sort of estimate completed. Well, let's take it to the to the crowd for some questions.

22:40Um, I know I've seen a couple come through so far. Does uh bill does it have to match to receiving records obvious automatically as well? It does. So, it uh you have a couple accounting preferences, right, that you could turn on that it says that either you can bill ahead of receipt or that you cannot. So if you cannot bill ahead of receipt, it it won't let you process it. It waits for that receipt. Okay. And then it looks like we have one other question here which is can we customize the approval process?

23:22Yes. So the approval process is standard netsuite approval. You could either use approvals or a approval workflow. So the approval pl process if you go with the workflow e or suite approvals they are custom suite approvals is customizable to an extent right it has some limitations but if that if you go past those limitations you could do uh the approval through a workflow and we have the capability to to help anybody set up those workflows. Yes. Wonderful.

23:57All right. Well, thank you to everyone who has joined today. Um, we are excited that you guys are checking out Bill Capture and please let us know if you have any questions. Thank you everyone and have a great day.