Overview of FormSuite for Invoices

The FormSuite for Invoices SDK automates the processing of invoice forms. The SDK processes an image of an invoice, searches for and extracts data such as Invoice Number, Invoice Date, and Total Due from the image by organizing the data into label-data coupled pairs called FormFields. A FormField is composed of a label-data coupled pair.

The label in a FormField is the text on the document that defines the data in question. Wording like "Invoice Number", "Date of Invoice", and "Invoice #" are examples of FormField Labels. To be more exact, they would be the "Label Alias" for a FormField label. For example, "Invoice Total Amount Due" could be the name of a label, but on some of the documents to be processed this may not be the wording identifying the Total Amount Due. To account for this need for divergence in the label, each label may be assigned any number of aliases. For the "Invoice Total Amount Due" in our example, alias could be: "Pay this Amount", "Amount Due", "Total Due", and "Total".

When FormSuite for Invoices finds a text string on one of the documents with the wording defined by one of these aliases in it, that text string will be captured as a Label for "Invoice Total Amount Due".

The data in a FormField would be the text on the document that is associated to the label by FormSuite for Invoices. Wording like "$100.00", "1/23/2014", or "Jan. 12, 2013" would be examples of FormField data.

FormSuite for Invoices also identifies and extracts line item data from tables found in the image of the invoice and builds FormTables from that data. A FormTable is composed of a set of column headers and a set of row data lists. Each row list has one and only one element for each header in the column header set. Each element in a row may or may not contain data.

During processing, a vendor is matched with the input invoice. This is accomplished by matching the vendor’s phone numbers and address found on the images with those posted in a list of vendors. The vendor list is a user defined and generated list.

Once an invoice has been processed and verified, a template of that invoice is created and saved. This template will be used in future runs to improve the accuracy of the field matching. Each time the template is used it will be updated with new location and size data calculated from the old location and size data and from the new information found and verified for all the fields identified on the document.

In the future, Accusoft will be able to process additional forms such as purchase orders, shipping documents, and health forms.