In talking with our Health and Life Sciences customers (and also other industries), a common issue is that your organization is required to capture receipts for expense reporting. If you have been a part of submitting expenses as an employee, you likely have begun to utilize your mobile device to capture receipts (please tell me you aren’t saving paper receipts to submit manually!).
For some time, I have recommended utilizing Office Lens to capture receipts. Office Lens is a free application that you can download from Google Play (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft.office.officelens) and Apple’s App Store. (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/office-lens/id975925059?mt=8) Office Lens trims, enhances, and makes pictures of whiteboards and documents readable. You can use Office Lens to convert images to PDF, Word and PowerPoint files, and save to OneNote, OneDrive, or your local device. Utilizing Office Lens makes it easy to capture single or multi-page receipts and to save them to your OneDrive where you can quickly insert them into your expense reporting system. This will introduce the document in an electronic format to allow your organization to work with the file quickly and easily.
As you accumulate receipt captures over time in your OneDrive, you may find it difficult to locate a particular receipt when you need it. Of course it is possible to name the files in a simple way and create a directory structure that makes it easy to find your documents. One new option in OneDrive involves our use of AI to look into image files and locate text. As you can see in the example below, I couldn’t locate a particular receipt, but using search within OneDrive, I was able to quickly locate the receipt that contained the keyword “shrimp.” (Some details removed from the image.)
As you can see, utilizing this technology makes it easy to both capture and locate receipts and makes for a simple digital workflow that has now been infused with AI capabilities in Office 365.