Modern accounting software often includes features for receiving supplier invoices, extracting essential data, and storing it as records. But what if you could streamline this process even further with a custom solution tailored to your needs?
Using Microsoft Power Apps, you can quickly build a flow that takes an invoice from your mailbox, extracts relevant data, and stores it in a table. In this blog, we’ll demonstrate how you can achieve this in minutes.
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Outline of blog activities
Creating the database
First, we need a database to store the extracted invoice data. We will leverage a database in Microsoft DataVerse to manage your invoices.
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Go to your Power Apps Home Page and click on Tables
2. If this is the first time you are creating a database, you will see a page like the below. Click on CREATE DATABASE.
3. Choose the Language and Currency of your choice and click CREATE MY DATABASE.
4. Now that you have your first database, Power Apps gives you options to create tables. The easiest is to use a prompt. Click DESCRIBE THE NEW TABLE
5. Use the below prompt to create your Invoices table
I am maintaining a list of supplier invoices that my business receives. I want to create a table that will contain the data extracted from the invoice. It should have the common invoice fields
The prompt displays a preview of the table to be created.
6. You can fine tune your table by adding more columns using additional prompts. (E.g., "Add columns for supplier number, invoice category")
7. When you are happy with the columns for your table, click on CREATE to finish. This will create the table and populate it with some sample data as well.
Creating the Power App Flow
Great!!! Now that you have the table ready to accept the data, let us create the Power App Flow to process the invoices.
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From the Power Apps Home Page go to the Flows page
2. Click on the NEW FLOW menu and choose AUTOMATED CLOUD FLOW
3. Give your Flow an appropriate name. For the Flow's trigger, choose WHEN A NEW EMAIL ARRIVES and click the CREATE BUTTON. This trigger specifies that this Flow is an automatic flow that will get triggered whenever a new email is received in the specified email inbox.
4. Now you will see the Flow Editor with the first step created.
At this time Power App will use the logged in user's email inbox to watch for incoming emails. You can always change this to a different mailbox belonging to your organization. This will typically be a dedicated AP Processing email address that can be shared with the suppliers for sending in invoices.
You can click on SHOW ADVANCED OPTIONS to expand and specify additional options. You can specify TO and SUBJECT filters. This tells Flow to process only emails addressed to a specific email address, that contains the keyword INVOICE in the subject and only if it has any attachments.
5. Click on the NEW STEP button below the first step and look for an operation from Power Apps AI Builder - EXTRACT INFORMATION FROM INVOICES.
AI Builder is a new feature of Power Apps that includes several useful pre-packaged operations.
6. The Invoice processing step is now added to the editor.
Click on the INVOICE FILE text box and select the ATTACHMENTS CONTENT as the file to be processed. This directs Flow to get the attachments that was received in the email from the previous step.
Once the Invoice File to Process is selected the Flow will look like the below.
7. After the data is extracted from the invoice we need to specify what to do with the data. In our case we want to save the data to the Table we created at the beginning of this exercise.
Click on the ADD AN ACTION link and look for an operation call ADD A NEW ROW TO SELECTED ENVIRONMENT
Now we map the individual fields from the extracted invoices to the Table we defined in the very first step.
8. Click on SAVE to save the flow once all the fields are mapped.
We have the Flow ready to go when an email is received in the specified inbox.
Testing the Flow
Test the Flow by sending an invoice to the specified email address. After the few minutes you will be able to track the Flow's run by clicking on the Flow from the Power App page.
You can check the Table to make sure the extracted data is inserted as a new row.
By following these simple steps, you can automate the process of handling supplier invoices, saving valuable time and reducing errors. Using Microsoft Power Apps and DataVerse, you can easily create a system that streamlines your invoice management, allowing you to focus on growing your business. Stay tuned for more tips and tutorials to help you make the most of technology in your day-to-day operations.
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