Analytics reports
AP Essentials provides several reports that contain detailed information about document status, document volumes, performance statistics and more. The reporting system is called Analytics. Analytics reports are available via Admin Center and offer ways of browsing information in an easy-to-use interface.
All reports are expressed using UTC time.
Analytics reports are enabled on all partners by default. To access Analytics from the customer level, however, the Analytics service must be enabled on the customer account.
If you have multiple accounts in Admin Center, make sure you sign out of Analytics reports before logging in with another account.
Administrators with the Access Analytics privilege can view the reports by navigating to an organization overview page and clicking Open Analytics. The view that appears organizes the reports in the menus described below: Home, Workload, Volumes and Performance. The reports, and their contents, can vary, depending on which services you use. For example, the Workflow queue report is only available if you use Workflow services. Likewise, the availability of accounts payable information and accounts receivable depends on your role. Partner and customer group administrators have access to accounts payable and accounts receivable information if they manage both types of organizations.
Each report is interactive. You can fine-tune the information you need by clicking data points in the reports and "drilling down" into more specific information. Many reports also have filter boxes that you can use to filter the report by organization, date and other aspects. In some reports, such as the Total process time and Process time by sender reports, you can see more detailed information by hovering your mouse over the data points in the graph.
Home
The Home menu displays a dashboard that gives you a quick overview of the system by displaying a few of the most popular reports, which are also available in the other menus. You can see the current status of documents in progress, as well as graphs from four reports: Workload overview, Volumes overview, Pending user action and Total process time.
Workload
The Workload menu contains reports about the status of documents that are currently in progress. You can use these reports to help identify issues with documents that are in progress. The Workload menu contains these reports:
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Overview - Displays the total number of documents that are currently in progress in data-capture process or a workflow, if Workflow services are enabled. Note the Documents button, which displays detailed document information.
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Accrual - Displays information about documents that are currently being processed in a workflow. Documents in this view have already been verified, but have not been sent to the target system for final posting. When partner administrators or customer group administrators choose an organization on this report, only accounts-payable organizations are available for selection.
Click Download to export the accrual report in CSV format. When you download a report, the information contained in the report reflects the current view, including any filters you may have applied. If there is no data in the current view, then the report is also empty.
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Pending user action - Displays documents that are currently in progress, grouped by status.
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On hold - Displays documents that are currently on hold, grouped by user. The underlying document statuses are also depicted in the report.
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Workflow queue - Displays the number of documents in workflow. You can filter the report by workflow type (coding and approval workflow and correction workflow). This report is only available if you use Workflow services. When partner administrators or customer group administrators choose an organization on this report, only accounts-payable organizations are available for selection.
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By due date - Displays invoices sorted by the due date field, so you can easily see invoices that are past due, due within seven days, due within 30 days or due later than 30 days. This report is only available for accounts-payable processes.
- By user - Displays the number of documents in workflow, grouped by user. This report is only available if you use Workflow services. Click the Documents button to see detailed information about each document that this view is based on. When partner administrators or customer group administrators choose an organization on this report, only accounts-payable organizations are available for selection.
- Rejected - Displays the number of rejected documents according to the
specified date range, organized into two reports:
By reject code and
By user. Note that only documents that are rejected using
custom reject codes appear in these two views.
Documents rejected using "reject reasons" are included on the Pending user action view. You can view the reject reason by clicking the Documents button and locating the document in the list. The reject reason is displayed in the Comment field.
- By reject code - Graphically displays the number of rejected documents, grouped according to whether they were rejected during verification or a workflow. Below the graph is a table which you can use to drill down the information further by user and buyer.
- By user - Graphically displays the number of rejected documents, grouped by user and reject code.
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Request for information - Displays the number of requests for information made during verification and approval.
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By requested user - Displays the number of requests for information made by each user, differentiated by whether the requests were made during verification or approval.
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By requested recipient - Displays the number of requests for information received by each recipient, differentiated by whether the requests were made during verification or approval.
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Volume
The Volume menu contains reports about historical document volumes. These reports can help you understand historical development and load distribution. The Volume menu contains these reports:
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Overview - Displays successfully processed documents and deleted documents. You can choose custom date ranges and drill down by organization.
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By organization - Displays documents processed per day, grouped by organization down to the buyer/seller level. You can choose custom date ranges.
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By user - Displays the number of documents processed per user according to document status (Document created, Document verified, Document rejected, Document deleted) in the specified time period. You can choose custom date ranges.
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By sender - Displays the number of documents processed grouped by the sender (supplier/customer). Use the Account type box to filter accounts by accounts payable and accounts receivable. You can choose custom date ranges. Hover your mouse over the graph to see more detailed information.
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Annual comparison - Displays year-over-year comparisons of successfully processed documents.
- Document processing - Displays the current number of in-progress, rejected,
processed and deleted documents. The basis for this report is the number of documents received during the specified time period.
Unlike other document volume reports, in this report the
Received documents equal the sum of the other statuses.
Example
In this example, a date is specified. One hundred documents were received during that time, and of those 100 documents, 50 were successfully processed, 10 were rejected, 20 were deleted, and 20 are in progress (100 = 50+10+10+30).
Organization Received Successfully processed Rejected Deleted In progress Buyer 1 100 50 10 20 20 -
Billing - Displays information that you can use a basis for billing customers. This view has two reports in CSV format that you can download, a default report, and a detailed report. Click Download to obtain the default report and click Download detailed to obtain a detailed report.
The billing view is not visible to customer administrators. Partner administrators can view billing reports for all customers they oversee, even when accessing Analytics at the customer level.
Performance
The Performance menu contains reports that help you determine how well an organization processes documents by analyzing processing times. The Performance menu contains these reports:
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Total process time - Displays the average processing time for documents for the current month. You can choose custom date ranges. Hover your mouse over the data points in the graph to see more detailed information.
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Process time by sender - Displays the average processing time for documents grouped by the sender (supplier/customer). Use the Account type box to filter accounts by accounts payable and accounts receivable. Hover your mouse over the bars in the graph to see more detailed information.
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Total verification time by user - Displays the total time (in hours) a user has spent verifying documents. Only the top 50 users who spend the most time verifying documents are displayed. This report helps you see how much time, in total, your users spend verifying documents. You can also compare users to see who spends the most time verifying documents.
Verification begins when a user opens a document, and ends when the document is saved, rejected, verified, held or a request for information is made. Only documents that are successfully processed or deleted within the specified time period are used in the calculation.
The image above shows how AP Essentials determines if a document is included in the verification time calculation. Document 1 is clearly within the date range. Two minutes passed from the moment the document was opened until the moment the document was verified, so two minutes are added to the total verification time of the user. Although document 2 was created outside of the date range, it was successfully processed within the date range, so its two minutes are also used in the report. Document 3 was handled two times and was successfully processed within the date range, so 3 minutes are added to the total verification time of the user. Document 4 was successfully processed outside the date range, so it is not used in the time calculation. Document 5 was deleted within the date range, so its time is added to the time calculation. If we assume all of these documents were processed by the same person, the total verification time is nine minutes.
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Verification time by sender - Displays the average time spent verifying one document by sender (supplier/customer). In other words, this report tells you which sender's documents take the longest time to verify on average. Only the top 50 senders that take the most time are displayed. Use the Account type box to filter accounts by accounts payable and accounts receivable. Click the bars in the graph to see the verification time by user.
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Verification velocity - Displays the average time (in minutes) it takes for a user to verify one document over time on a daily basis. This report is helpful because you can easily see if users are maintaining reasonable verification speeds. Decreasing trends in the line graph indicate users are verifying documents more quickly, whereas increasing trends indicate it is taking more time. A new user, for example, might display a gradually downward trending graph as the user becomes more proficient at verifying documents. In contrast, large volumes of problem documents, or long documents with large numbers of line-items, might decrease user efficiency, causing an upward trend in the graph. You can also use this report to compare verification velocities between users.
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Extraction - Displays reports that depict how well AP Essentials automatically finds fields on documents..
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Verification touch rate - Displays the percentage of documents that have bypassed manual verification (zero touch) in relation to the total number of documents verified over time.
Touch rate calculations work the same for suppliers and customers. If a document is "touched," it means it was manually verified. Therefore, "zero touch" refers to documents that were automatically processed without manual verification. In other words, zero-touch documents were never touched manually. A low "zero touch" rate indicates more documents requiring manual adjustment, whereas a high zero-touch rate indicates a high level of automation. By examining the touch rate you can determine, for example, which supplier's documents do not pass through the system easily.
In the example below, you see 1,783 documents from Polychemtex Inc. were successfully processed. None of those documents were processed manually. In other words, the data was extracted and sent to the target system without manual adjustment by AP Essentials Office users. Since 100% of the documents were processed automatically, without manual intervention, the zero-touch rate is 100%, which is the best possible result. Likewise, Anoconia Corp also has a perfect score. Half of Profile Construction documents required manual adjustment, yielding a zero-touch rate of 50%. The remaining suppliers required manual adjustment of all documents, resulting in a zero-touch rate of 0%, the lowest possible score. Low zero-touch rates can indicate poor performance, which might require investigation, depending on the quantity of documents affected and which workflow settings you use.
If you use Workflow services and Allow account coding during verification is enabled, touch rates can be skewed adversely because coding an invoice during verification counts as "touching" a document. Currently, there is no way to distinguish between coding during verification and adjustments made due to poor interpretation.
Any adjustments made by line-item pairing also count as touching.
If the DATA VERIFICATION setting is set to Always, the zero-touch rate will always be 0% because this forces all documents to be manually verified. Conversely, setting DATA VERIFICATION to Never will always give a 100% zero-touch rate because documents are never verified.
When investigating low touch rates, consider the following conditions as possible causes:
- As noted above, account coding during verification, line-item pairing and the DATA VERIFICATION setting can affect the touch rate.
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Low-resolution documents, which cause poor interpretation.
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Incorrect selection of the buyer/seller or document type during document upload.
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Incorrect document separation.
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Incorrectly drawn line-item fields or header fields.
Extraction
The Extraction menu contains reports that depict how well AP Essentials automatically finds fields on documents. This report is only available for accounts-payable processes. Success rates are determined by analyzing how often users change field values. Generally, if extracted field values are not being changed by users during verification, this is an indication that AP Essentials is extracting the fields correctly. By examining the ratios between fields which AP Essentials thinks are Complete, with fields that are changed and unchanged by users, we can determine extraction performance. For example, if a particular field value is never changed, it means AP Essentials correctly found the field 100% of the time. As a result, this field would have a high rate of success (100%). However, if a particular field value is changed frequently, it means AP Essentials has difficulty finding the field, and it would have a low success rate.
Extraction data is calculated using invoices that were extracted and manually verified during the time you specify in the Date range. The data can include invoices that are still being processed in AP Essentials. Invoices that skip manual verification are not included in the extraction statistics. For example, if 100 invoices were extracted during the Date range, and 80 invoices skipped manual verification, only the 20 invoices that were manually verified will be included in the extraction statistics.
Note that solutions that use external extraction may not provide any extraction statistics because the API does not require feedback of external verification data.
Success rates for suppliers and buyers are measured in terms of identification rates, confidence rates and correctness rates. When calculating rates for fields, for example, we analyze the relationships depicted in the diagram below.
Note that the green area in the middle depicts an overlap of fields that are marked as Complete by AP Essentials and fields that were not changed by users during verification.
Success rates for suppliers and buyers are measured in terms of:
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Identification rate - Measures how successfully suppliers or buyers are automatically identified. The
identification rate is determined by comparing the number of unchanged fields to the total number of fields (changed and
unchanged). The rate is calculated by dividing the number of unchanged fields with the total number of fields and multiplying by
100 to get the percentage.
For example, assume you are looking at the supplier identification rate of 100 invoices, where 90 supplier fields were not changed during verification. In other words, there are 100 supplier fields in total, 10 of which were changed during verification. The other 90 were not changed during verification.
(90/100) × 100 = 90%
The result is an identification rate of 90%, which means 90% of the suppliers were automatically identified correctly.
- Confidence rate - Measures how much users can rely on
AP Essentials
to correctly find supplier or buyer fields. The confidence rate is similar to the identification rate, but the pool of
fields is limited to fields that
AP Essentials
thinks it captured correctly. The confidence rate answers the question: what percentage of fields that
AP Essentials
thought it captured correctly were actually captured correctly? The confidence rate is calculated by dividing the
number of fields that
AP Essentials
assigned the
Complete
status to (and the user did not change during verification), with the number of fields that
AP Essentials
assigned the
Complete
status to.
For example, assume you are looking at the supplier confidence rate of 100 invoices. AP Essentials assigned the Complete status to 95 supplier fields. Of those 95 Complete fields, only 5 were changed during verification. In other words, AP Essentials and the users agree that 90 of the fields were captured correctly.
(90/95) × 100 = 94.7%
The result is a confidence rate of 94.7%, which means users can rely on AP Essentials to correctly find supplier fields 94.7% of the time.
- Correctness rate - Measures the percentage of fields that are automatically extracted correctly without user
interaction. The correctness rate is determined by comparing the number of fields that
AP Essentials
assigned the
Complete
status, which were also unchanged during verification, to the total number of fields (changed and unchanged).
The rate is calculated by dividing the number of
Complete and unchanged fields with the total number of fields and multiplying by 100 to get the percentage.
For example, assume you are looking at the supplier confidence rate of 100 invoices. AP Essentials assigned the Complete status to 95 supplier fields. Of those 95 Complete fields, only 5 were changed during verification. In other words, AP Essentials and the users agree that 90 of the fields were captured correctly.
(90/100) × 100 = 90%
The result is a correctness rate of 90%, which means supplier fields do not require user interaction 90% of the time.
The success rates for other fields are measured in terms of:
- True positive - AP Essentials captured the field correctly and assigned the Complete status to the field. The user did not change the field value during verification. In this case, AP Essentials and the user agree the field was captured correctly.
- False positive - AP Essentials thinks it captured the field correctly and assigned the Complete status to the field. However, the user changed the field value during verification. In this case, the user determined that AP Essentials did not capture the field correctly.
- True negative - AP Essentials had trouble finding the field and assigned the Uncertain status to the field. The user changed the field value during verification. In this case, AP Essentials and the user agree that the field was not captured correctly.
- False negative - AP Essentials had trouble finding the field and assigned the Uncertain status to the field. However, the user did not change the field value. In other words, the field was captured correctly, even though AP Essentials was not sure about its correctness. In this case, the user determined that AP Essentials did capture the uncertain field correctly.
These reports are available:
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Supplier identification and field extraction - Displays supplier identification and field extraction rates. Triangles indicate the percent change over the last 30 days.
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Supplier identification over time - Displays supplier identification rates over time, so you can see if rates are improving or worsening. This is helpful, for example, to see if changes made to supplier master data increase your identification rates. Triangles indicate the percent change over the last 30 days.
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Supplier identification by organization - Displays supplier identification rates over time, grouped by organization. Triangles indicate the percent change over the last 30 days.
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Buyer classification - Displays classification rates over time, grouped by organization. Triangles indicate the percent change over the last 30 days.
Update frequency
Analytics data is updated according to this schedule.
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Every hour, on the hour, data for these reports are updated:
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Workload
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Volume (excluding Billing)
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Total process time
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Process time by supplier
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Touch rate
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Billing data is updated once per day on each system.
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Australia 15:07 UTC
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Europe 02:07 UTC
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North America 08:07 UTC
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Total verification time by user, Verification time by supplier and Verification velocity report data is updated once per day on each system.
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Australia 16:07 UTC
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Europe 03:07 UTC
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North America 09:07 UTC
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Extraction data is updated once per day on each system.
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Australia 17:07 UTC
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Europe 04:07 UTC
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North America 10:07 UTC
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