Working with Paper and PDF Documents

  • 13/02/2023
  • 9 minutes to read

Once a document has been imported into Continia Document Capture, whether as a PDF file or as a scanned paper document, you can capture textual information in it and start working with it. The information you need to capture depends on the specific type of document, but no matter what types of documents you’re dealing with, you handle and process them in the same place – the document journal.

The main purpose of the document journal is to enable you to work with imported documents and capture textual information contained in these documents. Once the information has been captured in the document journal, you must register the document. By registering a document, you convert all captured information into a real business entity in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. For example, when you register a purchase invoice received from a vendor, you create a Business Central purchase invoice.

Important

You can configure Document Capture to work with many types of documents that are related to different records or entities in Business Central. Typically, Document Capture is used to process purchase invoices and credit memos, but it can also be used for processing sales orders, contracts, item certificates, and many other types of documents. When you process purchase invoices and credit memos, the documents are linked to vendors. For illustrative purposes, this article will focus exclusively on vendors, but please bear in mind that this serves only as an example and that it might as well have been customers, items, fixed assets, or something else.

Overview of the document journal

To access the document journal, follow these steps:

  1. Choose the Search icon, enter Document Categories, and then choose the related link.
  2. Select the code of the relevant document category – in this case PURCHASE – to open the document journal.

The document journal consists of four main sections:

Document list (left-hand side): This is in fact a table that lists all documents that are currently included in the selected journal. For each document, the table provides you with useful information such as the document number, the vendor name, the template used, and the number of pages. In addition, the OK field indicates if all captured document values are valid and whether the individual document is ready to be registered.

Document fields (left-hand side): In this section, all fields that have been identified in the currently selected document are displayed along with their corresponding values. The list of fields is determined by the document template, and for each field Document Capture indicates if the value is considered to be valid according to the configuration of each template field.

Comments (left-hand side): This section displays comments relating to the selected document. There are three different types of comments: Information, Warning, and Error. To learn more, see Configuring Comment Types and Importance.

Document viewer (right-hand side): The image on the right shows a visual representation of the actual scanned document (either PDF or XML) after it has been OCR-processed. For PDF documents, the document image is interactive, meaning that you can manually select text anywhere in the image to capture it as a value associated with a certain field. To learn more, see Capturing Fields in a Document. Note that you can resize the document viewer simply by dragging the vertical handle on the left side of the document viewer FactBox panel. This also applies to all other pages that include the document viewer.

Note

During the OCR-processing of a document, a visual representation of the document is created for display purposes, which may result in fewer colors and a lower resolution than the original document. This is done to optimize performance and usability for you when you work with the document in Business Central. What you see in the document viewer is the OCR-processed version of the document – it’s not the original document, which may look slightly different. The actual OCR and recognition process is still performed on the original document at the highest level of detail. To learn more, see OCR-Processing a Document.

Changing a document’s associated vendor

By default, Document Capture links all documents to existing records in Business Central. Purchase documents are linked to vendors, meaning that each purchase document is linked to one specific vendor. In the document journal, some of the first columns of the document list – the columns Vendor and Name – show the number and the name of the vendor that each document is linked to. When importing documents, Document Capture identifies the vendor automatically based on different parameters. It’s useful to understand these parameters, so we recommend that you read the article Finding the Document Source and Template.

In the event that Document Capture doesn’t manage to identify a vendor, or in case you’d like to change the identified vendor, you can easily assign a new vendor from the document journal. To do this, follow these steps:

  1. Choose the Search icon, enter Document Categories, and then choose the related link.
  2. Select the code of the relevant document category – in this case PURCHASE – to open the document journal.
  3. In the document list, go to the line of the imported document whose vendor you want to change, and select the Vendor field. Then select the three dots that appear in order to open the Vendors window.
  4. Choose the vendor that you want to assign by selecting the relevant number in the No. column.

Note

You can also set up search texts to help Document Capture identify the correct vendor. To learn more, see Finding the Document Source and Template.

Showing registered and rejected documents

When you open the document journal, it will be filtered to show only open documents. However, you can also easily filter it to display documents that have been registered or rejected. To do this, follow these steps:

  1. Choose the Search icon, enter Document Categories, and then choose the related link.
  2. Select the code of the relevant document category – in this case PURCHASE – to open the document journal.
  3. In the upper-right corner, above the action bar, go to Status Filter and select the box to display the filter options. The default option is Open, meaning that only documents with the status "Open" are displayed in the document list. Change this as needed by selecting your preferred filter option.

The document list will be updated to display only documents with the status you selected. If you selected All, all documents are displayed in the list, regardless of status.

See also

Capturing Fields in a Document
Configuring Comment Types and Importance
OCR-Processing a Document
Finding the Document Source and Template
Registering Documents
Working with Templates
Setting up New Template Fields