The new Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations vendor invoice automation feature: Does it pass the practice test?

It was back in May 2017 when I published a couple of posts on how to set up vendor invoice workflows for expense-related invoices in Dynamics AX and 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition (D365FOE). One of the reasons behind those posts was a reluctance among customers and colleagues to use the standard workflow functionality. Even though I knew that the standard workflows had some weaknesses, I tried to push their usage, because I felt that the decision to implement software add-ons was often made too quickly and without a rigorous investigation of the standard functionalities.

Shortly after publishing those posts, Microsoft released the new vendor invoice automation feature in August, which gave the discussion a new momentum. But, one of our project managers got a call from an ISV who was supposed to deliver a vendor invoice processing add-in, informing him that the solution purchased by a Sycor customer wouldn't be ready before the intended go-live date.

It quickly turned out that the customer required a process for handling expense-related invoices only, because the purchase order process would not be used in the foreseeable future. To me this seemed to be a golden opportunity to push the newly-released vendor invoice automation feature. Shortly after, we made an appointment for a first conference room pilot (CRP), where we would present the following three major parts of the invoicing process:

Part 1: OCR scan and invoice import

Due to the very short timeframe before the CRP, we were unable to ...