New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 2: Capture Data from E-Docs with Azure AI Document Intelligence

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 2 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 2.

The 10th of the new functionality in the Application section is capture data from e-docs with Azure AI Document Intelligence.

The e-documents framework in Business Central is the cornerstone for the exchange of electronic documents, and the import and export of data that supports operations and finances. When working with vendor invoices and receipts through e-documents, accounts payable departments can streamline their OCR and document capture with native Azure AI Document Intelligence support in Business Central. They can capture data at the invoice line level, so received invoices and receipts are ready for further processing.

Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public Preview: –
General Availability: Oct 2024

Feature Details

In this release, Microsoft are extending the e-documents framework to seamlessly handle and process imported e-documents. For some types of documents, such as PDFs and images, an OCR service must capture the data. In this release, there’s a new modern OCR service in Business Central that uses state-of-the-art technology to process invoices and receipts. This service is powered by a native integration into Azure AI Document Intelligence, which specializes in recognizing invoices and receipts (among other things).

E-documents is the key framework for working with incoming and outgoing documents and data exchange in Business Central. Going forward, Microsoft will enrich e-documents with features to help streamline document transport, processing, and sending/receipt, so document exchange can work smoothly. With the new Azure AI Document Intelligence processing in e-documents, the accounts payable department is empowered to process documents for the channel through which they prefer to receive e-documents

My Opinion

This sounds like Microsoft are extending the e-documents functionality to compete more with the Contina Document Capture extension which is widely used with Business Central. I need to do some testing to see how good a job this does.