Using OCR to speed up payment creation
How optical character recognition (OCR) can help automate, simplify, and speed up your payment creation process
How OCR works
When a bill is uploaded or emailed to your Routable inbox, our OCR engine looks for data that can help speed up your coding process and pre-fills it in the appropriate fields of the bill in Routable so that you can take action on it.
To use this feature:
Click Inbox in the left side navigation.
Click Upload bills in the top right corner of the screen.
Select the bill you want to pay and click Upload.
Click the refresh button to see status updates as your bill is processed. This can take a minute or two.
Once the bill attachment shows a green check icon, click the row to open the coding form.
To finish coding your bill:
Confirm that the vendor and contacts are correctly selected.
Update the invoice date (if needed) and verify the due date is correct.
Enter the bill number.
Select the account for each line item and confirm the description and amount is correctly filled in, for each.
Choose how and when to pay the bill.
Select approvers (if required).
Click Send Payment.
What fields will be filled for me?
Vendor
Invoice number
Invoice date
Due date
Line item description
Line item amount
Sales tax amount (filled as a line item)
Switch between detailed line items and summary coding
Details of line items that Routable's OCR feature was able to extract will be automatically entered into the bill coding form.
If you prefer to code your bill with less detail, you can click the Merge line items button to reduce the bill to a single line for the total amount. You can reverse this by clicking undo merge line items.
⭐️ Note: Your selection will be permanent once you save the coded bill.
Split attachments
If multiple files were attached to the same email containing separate bills, you can separate these to be coded independently.
Click to open the file selector.
Click an attachment you wish to turn into a separate bill.
Click the split button on the right and confirm.
A new record will be created in the Inbox with the chosen file attached. The file is removed from the original bill.
Change the which attachment is scanned
If multiple files were attached to the same email, you can change which file’s OCR data is used to fill the bill coding form.
Click to open the file selector.
Click an attachment you wish to use to fill the bill coding form.
Click the Scan button to the right and confirm by clicking Update.
Existing data in the bill coding form will be replaced with data extracted from the attachment that you selected.
Change the primary attachment
If multiple files were attached to the same email, you can change which file’s OCR data is used to fill the bill coding form by changing the primary attachment.
Click to open the file selector.
Click an attachment you wish to use to fill the bill coding form.
Click the Make primary button on the right and confirm by clicking Update.
Existing data in the bill coding form will be replaced with data extracted from the attachment that you selected.