Digitizing business processes delivers sustainable efficiency gains. Tasks that once required repetitive manual work can now be automated with a few clicks. Two components of the Microsoft Power Platform provide the right toolkit: Power Automate and AI Builder. This article shows how they work together to automate invoice intake.
Why automate incoming invoices?
Manual invoice verification is error-prone, ties up accounting talent, and makes audit trails harder to maintain. Automated flows ensure consistent approval paths, speed up releases, and supply structured data for reporting and archiving.
What do you need?
Power Automate
Power Automate turns recurring procedures into flows that run reliably at scale. Our curated Microsoft Flow examples already illustrate how versatile that can be. Every automation starts with clearly described steps that you then translate into a flow.
AI Builder
AI Builder augments apps and flows with artificial intelligence. The platform offers multiple model types that can identify text, detect objects, or calculate probabilities. For incoming invoices you will primarily rely on the Form Processing model, which extracts structured key-value pairs from documents or images so the flow can keep processing them.
How to automate invoice intake
To digitize the handling steps you need a flow that processes uploaded files, extracts relevant information, and stores everything in SharePoint. The flow starts with a manual trigger: you upload an invoice and the automation completes the remaining steps.
Prepare the flow
Decide in Power Automate where files will be stored and how SharePoint metadata should be populated. Plan which fields you want to capture—invoice number, date, amount, supplier, and so on—and add matching columns to your document library.
Step-by-step guide
- Create the AI model: Open AI Builder on make.powerapps.com, then choose Build.
- Select Form Processing: Pick the Form Processing model, name it, and make sure your training documents share the same layout.
- Define fields: Add the field names whose values should be extracted from the invoices.
- Upload documents: Provide at least five sample invoices with an identical structure so the model can learn repeatable patterns.
- Tag documents: Highlight the relevant text snippets and link them to the fields you created earlier.
- Train the model: Start the training process and wait for AI Builder to process the data.
- Publish the model: Once training completes, publish the model and make it available to Power Apps or Power Automate.
- Create the flow: Use the template Use model → New flow, which connects to the environment’s Microsoft Dataverse and hands over the extracted data.
What the finished flow looks like
The flow runs as soon as you hit the associated button. AI Builder currently accepts only form data, so no alternative trigger is available yet. The Process and save information from forms action returns the extracted invoice data; SharePoint then stores the file and writes the metadata. Your documents end up neatly tagged and archived. Recognition is particularly reliable with U.S. invoices because date and currency formats are detected more consistently. We are testing variants for Austrian invoices in parallel to reach the same success rate.
Next steps
Want to implement similar automations or improve existing workflows? Let’s talk—we can help you design and roll out the solution. Contact us