Capturing Line Fields in a Document (Line Recognition)

• 11/09/2024
• 10 minutes to read

The process of capturing line fields in an imported document is very similar to that of capturing header fields, and you have to go through many of the same steps for both processes. The main difference between the two is that header field recognition completely disregards the lines of the document and only checks the document header when capturing field captions and values, whereas line recognition captures field captions and values in the document lines in addition to the captured header fields. This ensures a higher level of captured detail for each document, which may be very useful in some contexts and unnecessary in others, depending on what data is needed in your organization.

The line recognition process is described in detail below. Note that if it’s the first time you receive a document from a vendor, there are no templates associated with that vendor. To assign a template to the vendor, you have to activate field recognition in the document journal (see step 4 below). This automatically creates a template, links it to the vendor, and captures all fields for that document.

To capture line fields

To capture the fields of a document, including line fields, follow these steps:

1. Choose the 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. If Document Capture has automatically identified a vendor for the document whose fields you want to capture, the number of the identified vendor is displayed in the Vendor field of the document list. If no vendor has been identified, assign a vendor manually as described under Changing a document’s associated vendor.

4. Provided that this is the first document you receive and import from the assigned vendor, there's no associated template, so you must assign one by activating field recognition: In the action bar, select Home > Recognize Fields. Field captions and values will then be captured and highlighted using orange and blue boxes in the document viewer on the right.

   Note

   If you've previously received and imported documents from the assigned vendor, the template that's associated with that vendor is automatically used for capturing field captions and values.

5. In the action bar, select Document > Document Card to open the document card.

6. On the Lines FastTab, for the first line in the table, select the field in the No. column. In the document viewer, locate the line column header that corresponds to the selected No. field (it could be named Item, Item #, Number or similar), and then right-click and hold the button to draw an orange box around the located header in the document viewer.

   Note

   If the imported document doesn't contain a line column header that corresponds to No., move on to the first field that does in fact have a corresponding line column header in the document (typically Description), and then right-click to draw an orange box around the header in the document viewer.

   However, note that the No. field is typically mandatory (as is the case in the default template), meaning that the document can't be registered if this field contains no value. If so, you must manually enter a value in the field. The same goes for any other fields that have been set to Required on the template card.

7. Repeat step 6 above for all relevant fields – that is, for all fields that have a matching column header in the document. All column headers in the line section of the document should now be enclosed in orange boxes in the document viewer.

8. In the action bar, select Home > Recognize Fields. The values below each of the boxed column headers will now be automatically transferred to their corresponding fields on the Lines FastTab, for each line in the document.

9. For each of the lines, select the relevant values in Translate to Type and Translate to No. in order to let Document Capture know how to translate the vendor's account references into account types and numbers that can be used internally.

   Note

   To change the order in which columns are presented in the Lines section, select Template > Template Card in the action bar and, in the Fields section, use the Move Up or Move Down actions to shift the position of the selected field. Don't attempt to achieve the same result by moving line columns via Settings > Personalize on the Document Card, as this breaks the link between the column in focus and the related value highlighted in the document viewer.

All document lines have now been captured, and line recognition has been automatically activated for the assigned template.

To configure line recognition

When you've activated line recognition for a document template as described above, you can configure it in various ways. To do this, follow these steps:

1. In the document journal, select the document whose template you want to configure in terms of line recognition.

2. In the action bar, select Template > Template Card to open the template card.

3. On the General FastTab, Recognize Lines has been enabled automatically if you've manually captured line fields following the guide above. If you haven't captured line fields yet, enable Recognize Lines to activate line recognition. This will display the following configuration fields:

   • Vendor uses your Item Nos. – enable this if you use the same item numbers as the vendor.
   • First Table Line Has Captions – enable this if the top line in the document line table functions as a header with captions for each column (which is typically the case). This is enabled by default once you capture line fields manually.
   • Check Item Prices – enable this if you want to activate automatic checking of line item prices. With this enabled, Document Capture will automatically check the item prices of all recognized document lines against the vendor's calculated item prices.

   Note

   If a recognized price differs from the vendor item price, a warning is displayed in the comments section of the document journal. Prices are only checked if no related purchase orders exist. The feature takes into account whether any special vendor purchase prices or discounts apply to the checked item numbers.

   Tip

   PDFs are complex, multi-layered documents. If you encounter odd values when processing a PDF in Document Capture, open the PDF using a modern browser, MS Paint, or equivalent. You can then either print it to PDF or save it as a PDF once again, which should allow Document Capture to process it correctly. Note that this only applies to on-premises setups, as the Cloud OCR is more precise.

See also

Working with Paper and PDF Documents
Capturing Header Fields in a Document