While our new Purchase Invoice OCR feature is currently in live testing with customers who’ve opted in, this summary covers all the changes that everyone will see on their system from day one. From a completely refreshed Invoice Review screen to new Schedule Board columns across your contract grids, here is a complete breakdown of what has been added to the platform:
Coming Soon Purchase Invoice OCR & Reconciliation
At Business Pilot we are very aware that keying supplier invoices in by hand is the slowest part of running a purchase ledger, and the easiest place to make a costly mistake. Business Pilot will soon read and input them for you.
We have developed a new plugin feature to enable you to upload a supplier invoice and Business Pilot will extract the Supplier, purchase order number, invoice reference, invoice date, net and VAT, contract number and fills them straight into the invoice for you. Your team stops typing and starts checking, which is the job you actually wanted them doing.
Purchase invoice OCR will be an optional extra rather than part of the standard product. We’re opening it up to customers who want to try it early, ahead of the wider release.
We’re in live testing now and will follow up with more information as soon as this is available. We know it’s a popular request and wanted to give you a heads up. It’s coming.
It’s been tested against the kind of messy, real world invoices your team actually deals with, not a tidy sample set. Where it’s confident in a value, it fills it in. Where it isn’t, it flags the invoice for a person to check rather than guessing.
Invoice Review
Invoice Queries has been renamed Invoice Review and given a refresh. It is the same screen in the same place on the Finance menu, doing the same job, anything on a purchase invoice that needs a person to look at it waits here rather than being posted incorrectly or dropped.
The list now shows the source, PO number, customer, supplier, invoice reference, net, VAT and invoice date, together with the reason it was raised and who added it. Open one and you can correct what needs correcting and resolve it, or raise a query back where the invoice itself is wrong.
The Source column tells you where a review came from. For most customers that is the queries you raise yourselves, exactly as before.Â
The invoice document, alongside the invoice
Where a PDF has been uploaded against a purchase order invoice, you now see it on screen next to the fields rather than having to open it separately. This applies in three places:
- Adding a new invoice against a purchase order shows the document alongside the form as you fill it in.
- Opening an existing purchase order invoice to edit it shows the same.
- Editing an item in Invoice Review shows the document beside the values you are checking.
The file stays with the invoice rather than being discarded, and it can be downloaded directly from the purchase order invoice list. When a supplier queries a figure months later, the document that produced it is one click away.
Purchase Order Invoice Total
Adding an invoice against an existing purchase order now starts from the PO default rather than an empty box. The net is prefilled with what is actually left on the order, the PO net value less anything already invoiced, with credits taken into account, so the remaining balance is not something you work out by hand.
You can still type over it. The point is that the figure you most often want is already there to save input time, and invoicing over the order by mistake is harder.
Seeing more without opening records
The Live, All and Completed contract grids can now show a Schedule Boards column, so you can see which board a job sits on without opening each contract in turn. It is not on to begin with, add it from the column chooser on the grid.
Where a contract has been selected for fitting required, the column lists the allocated board. This defaults to main where customised boards are not in use. A contract that does not need fitting, or yet to be allocated, stays blank. Sorting and filtering follow what you see, so filtering the column for your default board finds those contracts too.
The column is included in the CSV exports from the Live, All, and Completed grids, and in the contract exports taken from a contact.
The Live Job Cost report now carries an Install Start Date column next to the Sales Date, so you can see when a job is due to start without cross-referencing back to the contract.
Sales Year
Sales Year configuration is now checked as you save it. If months, quarters or years leave dates uncovered, or a year runs longer than twelve months, you’ll be told why before it saves, and the Company and MI Sales dashboards will keep loading properly either way.
A misconfigured Sales Year could previously take down both dashboards without saying why. That’s fixed by validating on save, so a bad configuration is caught and explained at the point you create it, rather than surfacing later as a dashboard failure.
Open API
Four changes for anyone building against the API or through Zapier.
Purchase orders now expose their tax rate. TaxRate is returned on the purchase order invoice responses and taxRate appears on the Zapier purchase order trigger, so an automation can calculate and reconcile PO values properly. It is documented in the published Swagger definition.
There is a new route for attaching an image to a lead, POST /api/LeadImages/create, so photos taken off-system can reach the lead they belong to without someone re-uploading them by hand.
Image types can now be looked up, with find and search routes to match the ones document types already had. Attaching an image needs a valid image type, and there was previously no way to discover one without guessing.
Document type filtering now works. POST /api/DocumentTypes/find accepted name and active filters but ignored them and returned the full list whatever you sent. It now filters as documented.
Alongside these, POST/api/LeadDocuments/create has been fixed. It was returning 415 Unsupported Media Type to every request, on both hosts, with no request shape that worked.
All of the features detailed above have been fully released to Business Pilot today and are ready for your team to use.
We are continuously refining the system to remove manual bottlenecks so your staff can stop typing and start checking. If your business is taking part in the short beta test phase for our new Purchase Invoice OCR starting tomorrow, please keep an eye out for separate instructions and further information.
As always, if you need any assistance locating these new features or have questions about configuring your Sales Year or Open API connections, our support team is ready to help.