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)

* When a vendor invoice has multiple potential vendor name matches within the Routable system, Routable will display "suggested vendors" for consideration. If a "suggested vendors" is chosen, Routable will remember the vendor next time if the OCR vendor name is the same. 

💡 If any of the filled fields are inaccurate, consider training OCR to improve OCR accuracy → and to update the pre-filled values in the filled fields.

Summarize line items: 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 Summarize line items button to reduce the bill to a single line for the total amount. You can reverse this by deselecting Summarize 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 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.