Use Workflows To Process AP Invoices Through Unattached Documents

The Document Attachment feature within Dynamics AX is great, because you can attach files to any record in the system. But sometimes you have document attachments that do not have records that they can be attached to yet, and may have to create records and then attach them after the fact. In these cases you can take advantage of the unattached document feature and even add workflow processes around the document to make sure that it gets processed by the right people.

It’s like matchmaking, except for files.

How To Do It…

Start off by clicking on the Unattached Documents link within the Document Management folder of the Common group of the Home area page.

Select the document that you want to process and submit it to the Document Management workflow process.

Note: In this case we are linking the Unattached Document record to a scanned image that we have loaded into SharePoint.

Through the workflow process the AP clerk will be notified that they have a document that they need to process.

By following the Unattached Document link they are able to view the scanned image directly from within SharePoint.

The next step is to create the AP Invoice record based off the scanned image.

To attach the Unattached Document to the invoice for reference, click on the Attachments button within the Attachments group of the Vendor Invoices ribbon bar.

Then click on the New button in the menu bar and select the type of document that you want to associate the scanned invoice to.

In our case we will use the AP Invoice document type.

To search for the Unattached Document and link it to the attachment record, click on the Functions menu and click on the Select A Document File menu item.

This will give you a list of all the Unattached Documents. Just select the record for the scanned invoice, click on the Select button, and then click the Close button.

This will add a link to the document within SharePoint and you can even click on the Open button in the menu bar to view the record within SharePoint.

All that is left to do now is to return back to the work item list and complete the document management workflow.