Invoice Auto-Processing for Improved Receiving and Confirmation

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📌 Purpose

The goal of this project is to improve the efficiency and accuracy of scanning, confirming invoices in Catapult, and verifying missing items. The current process is time-consuming and involves significant manual effort, leading to inefficiencies.

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🚨 Current Bottlenecks

1️⃣ Handling Multiple Purchase Orders (Invoices)

• The same or similar items are often ordered across multiple invoices.
• While tracking different invoices might be necessary for special orders or ADS, it slows down the receiving process without adding value to the receiver.

2️⃣ Verifying Missing Items is Time Consuming

• When an item is flagged as "missing", it may fall into one of these cases:
  1. Scanned under a different invoice (not truly missing).
  2. Missed during scanning (requires rescanning).
  3. Actually missing (short, mispick, replaced, etc.).
• Checking across multiple invoices to confirm whether an item is truly missing takes excessive time, especially if the item has already been stocked.

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💡 Proposed Solution

I developed a simple program called InvoiceAuto that automates the following tasks:

1. Automatically distributes scanned items to their matching invoices, reducing manual tracking.
2. Consolidates surplus and missing items, allowing receivers to see, compare, and verify discrepancies in one step instead of manually searching through invoices.

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✅ Key Benefits

🚀 Increased Speed & Efficiency

✔ Receivers can scan items into a single invoice under the same account, reducing time spent navigating multiple invoices(unless scanning in the right invoice is otherwise necessary).

✔ Eliminates the need to search for "missing" items that were simply scanned under another invoice.

🎯 Improved Accuracy

✔ Simplifies discrepancy verification caused by item number mismatches (e.g., Lacroix Hi-biscus misidentification).

✔ Verifies missing items all at once, reducing back-and-forth validation efforts.

✔ Speeds up confirmation, increasing the chances of verifying missing items before they get stocked.

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⚠️ Important Cautions

• Each record must be manually checked as "verified." While this program adjusts received quantities, the verified flag cannot be modified via imports and must be checked manually in Catapult.
• Records of 0-ordered-0-received items must be removed manually. Since imports do not allow record deletion, these must be removed manually. Typically, these items are moved to the surplus list or other shorted records, and all transactions can be found in invoice_log.txt.
• Highly recommended to run this program after all scans are completed. Any changes made after exporting will not be reflected in this program's results.

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🛠 How to Use InvoiceAuto

Step 1: Scan Received Items

• Ideally, scan into the correct invoice, but it does not matter if scanned elsewhere (as long as you don’t mis-stock something, like special orders).

Step 2: Export Purchase Orders

• For all purchase orders shipped today (except cheese and bulk, which are paper-checked):
  • Open each purchase order.
  • Click Export > Yes and download the .txt files.

Step 3: Prepare the Files

1. Clear the invoices/ folder (prevents mixing invoices from previous days).
2. Move all exported .txt files into the invoices/ folder (These are the invoices that are to be processed, but also acts as a backup in case of errors).

Step 4: Run InvoiceAuto

• Execute InvoiceAuto.exe.
• The program will list all found invoices and prompt for confirmation:
  • If the list is correct, type 'y'.
  • If incorrect, type 'n' and update the invoices/ folder.

Step 5: Review Generated Output Files

• The program will create:
  • surplus.txt → Items not used to fill missing orders (over-scanned, over-shipped, or not ordered but received).
  • missing.txt → Items that could not be matched with any surplus (actual missing or scanning mistakes).
  • invoices_out/DONE-{P.O name}.txt → Updated invoice files ready for import into Catapult.

Step 6: Verify Missing Items

• Review missing.txt, locate items, and confirm before they get stocked.

• 💡 Example Issue Detection:

  Some items may have different item numbers between systems (e.g., Lacroix Hi-biscus is 54458 in their system but 54459 in ours).

  This always results in a "missing" 54458 and a "surplus" 54459.

  Comparing surplus.txt and missing.txt can reveal such mismatches.

Step 7: Import Updated Invoices into Catapult

1. Open Catapult and select the purchase order to process.
2. Click Import > select the corresponding file from invoices_out/.
3. When prompted to overwrite details, select 'No'.
4. You can disregard the system flags about unrecognized items.

Step 8: Complete the Purchase Order Confirmation

• Once imported, continue the normal confirmation process:
  • ✅ Fill in Alias, Terms, Receiver, Fuel Charges, Invoice Totals.
  • ✅ Check Verified for items where Shipped = Received.
  • ✅ Write Credit Memos for any shorted items.
  • ✅ Confirm new or replaced items.

Anything that happens in the process is logged into invoice_log.txt.

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📌 Summary

🚀 InvoiceAuto Helps:

✔ Speed up receiving by allowing flexible scanning.

✔ Automatically distribute scanned items into the correct invoices.

✔ Consolidate missing/surplus items for easy verification.

✔ Prevent unnecessary item searches across invoices.

✔ Increase accuracy by catching mismatched item numbers.

✔ Reduce manual effort in confirming invoices in Catapult.

By implementing this program, we can improve efficiency, reduce errors, and simplify the warehouse receiving process.

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This document was generated with assistance from ChatGPT.