A format essentially defines what you want to get out of a certain type of document. It defines the structure of the output and is very visible in Data view of the Data Entry Companion.
Format is a structured collection of Fields of interest and consists of
Text fields: Pieces of information that appear literally in the document
Tag fields: Information that does not appear literally in the document, but that can be derived. Tags come from a finite set of options.
Rows: Text and Tag fields that logically belong together
Format consists of at least one table: Format table.
There can be as many additional tables as needed for information that follows a row/table logic.
Format Table
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Edit Formats
Add new format: Click on the blue round button on the top right corner. Type your new format name in the pop-out box and click confirm. This will automatically add a new entry in the formats table.
Remove format: Click on the red delete button beside the format that you want to remove.
Edit format: Click on the blue edit button beside the format that you want to edit.
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Format Table
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These fields have a number of properties.
Index | Property | Description | Default |
1 | Mandatory | You can indicate whether or not a field is |
required before a file can be submitted. Mandatory fields will be marked as |
Annotation, tag, separator, computed
Indicates whether the field of interest is an annotation, a tag, a separator, or computed
Data type
Indicates whether this is a text field or a tag field
text field
red when not found and will block submission if not filled. | false |
2 | Field |
The number of options is virtually unlimited. You can specify a data type other than string to reduce the number of options for a text field. For example, here you can specify that the text should be an amount
string
Type in here the technical name of your fields. These names have to be identical to the field names that we support out-of-the-box (case-sensitive too). If we do not support the field yet, then no predictions will be made. | string | ||
3 | Annotation, Tag |
| annotation |
4 | Data type | Indicates in what format the fields should be saved | string |
5 | Scope | Indicates whether the scope is a page, a section or a document | section |
6 | Visible |
Indicates whether a field |
is visible in the review page | true |
7 | Multiple |
Indicates whether a field of interest can appear multiple times in the scope. If this is disabled, the machine will predict only one value for the field. | false | ||
8 | Count in evaluation | A flag to decide whether the specific field should be evaluated in the statistics. Setting this property on false enables some fields not to be taken into account in evaluations. This is useful for commentary and other optional fields. | true |
9 | Conditional |
Some fields of interest are only relevant depending on the value of other fields of interest. For example, you may only be interested in the VAT number of an invoice if |
it has been confirmed that the document is a valid invoice (valid_invoice field == true). |
none | ||
10 | Display name | This is the label that will be shown in the |
Front-End to the user of the data entry companion and in the stats pane |
. As opposed to the Field (2)(or technical field name), you can name the display name to a name that you think is more intuitive than the technical names of our out-of-the-box fields | same as value in Field (2) | |
11 | Technical name | This is the label that will be used when communicating to servers. |
12 | Description | A short text to characterise the field of interest. |
Scope (5) and the importance of page/subpage splitting
It is important to distinguish the different types of scope: file, document, page and sections.
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For fields in tables, there can only be one scope chosen per table.
Multiple and the importance of page/subpage splitting
This property is especially useful if splitting (page or subpage) is enabled. If the multiple box is ticked, it allows the tool to search for the field more than once.
Scenario 1 - page splitting enabled: Let’s say your client sent you a pdf file of not only once invoice but two or more merged into one pdf file, then this multiple box tells the Contract.fit solution that there will be not only one invoice_date but multiple. If the multiple box is not ticked, then the solution will only take into account the first invoice_date that it finds and assigns it to the whole file or document.
Scenario 2 - subpage splitting enabled: Often times when the finance department receives receipts, they receive a document with multiple receipts in one page. Once again, it would be logical to tick “multiple” for the field “gross_amount” or “invoice_date” as the chances that these fields are the same for all receipts are pretty slim.
Conditional
Conditional (9)
It is possible to add logical AND/OR conditions for specific fields. Choose any field of your liking and click on “show” in the conditional column. On the pop-up screen you can add rules that condition the situation where your selected field will be shown. It is also possible to add groups to manipulate the AND and OR logic. In the illustration below, the condition would work as follows: The field of interest would only be relevant if
The gross amount is not null, AND
Either the amount payable or the net amount is not null.
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Predefined data types
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“currency”, “language”, “country”: Creating these “currency”, “language”, and “country” fields now will have standardised predictions with our pre-filled predictors such as “USD“, “EUR“, “GBP“, etc. for currency. This also means that annotating currency signs ($) in the Data Entry Companion for currency fields will be correctly formatted to “USD”
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date fields: These fields will return a formatted field under the format DD/MM/YYYY. So even if in the Review page, the date is formatted as DD/MM/YY, this field will be correctly reformatted as DD/MM/YYYY.
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Tables
You may also want to maintain the row logic create a section for tables in the extraction of information. To this end, we allow you to specify tables, which contain one or more row types.For example: .
This would be useful when you process documents with line items or receipt lines. For example: On your invoice you may have a table of line items with four columns (all the articles you have bought (each article has its own article number, description, unit price, and quantity, line total). You would then have two types of rows for this table: line items and a total line. The total line would be of a different type as it will not have a unit price. It will have a fixed description ("total"), a quantity and an overall total.
Rows are essentially a sorted list of text and tag fields. In addition, they will have a row_type, which defines to which table they belong.
Edit Formats
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Add new format: Click on the green button on the bottom right corner. Type your new format name in the pop-out box and click confirm. This will automatically add a new entry in the formats table.
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Remove format: Tick the box beside the format that you want to remove and click on the red button on the bottom right corner.
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Add new field: Click on [edit] of the desired format, add a new field by typing the field name on the Label placeholder on the bottom of the table and adjust the properties for that field. Then click on the green publish button.
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Add conditional to the field: Click on [edit] of the desired format, go to the line of the field, column conditional, and add your conditions. More on this is mentioned just above, on this page, on the section Conditional.
Remove a field: Click on [edit] of the desired format, click on the cross on the right hand of the table for the field that you would like to remove. Then click on the green publish button.
Edit Formats through the Studio Controls in the Data Entry Companion
Format defines the fields you are interested in for a given document type. It is reflected in the data table that you can see in the Data Entry Companion. We have also made it possible for you to edit the format directly from within the Data Entry Companion.
To do this, you need to enable the Studio Controls from within the Data Entry Companion. You will recognise the Studio controls by the three dots icon.
Visibility of fields
Revision of ‘visible flag’, ‘visible if condition’ and ‘mandatory flag’ properties of fields as specified in the format
‘Visible flag’ and ‘visible if condition’
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Visible
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Visible if
(conditional)
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Result
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Explanation
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TRUE
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n/a (not set)
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Visible
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If no condition is set for visible_if, then the visible flag is used
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FALSE
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n/a (not set)
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Not visible
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TRUE
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TRUE (evaluates to)
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Visible
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When configured, “visible_if” has a higher priority than “visible”
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FALSE
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TRUE (evaluates to)
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Visible
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TRUE
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FALSE (evaluates to)
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Not Visible
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FALSE
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FALSE (evaluates to)
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Not visible
‘Mandatory flag’
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Mandatory field: Field can not be null (not specified, which means was not predicted), but can be an empty string. A mandatory field which is null is treated as an action
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Not mandatory field: Field can be null. A non-mandatory field which is null is not treated as an action
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Computed field is mandatory: computed field which evaluates to False is treated as an action
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). This information is different from the header fields that would generally appear only once in a document, such as one invoice date per invoice.
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As shown on the illustration above, you would have two distinct places for header fields and line items: the header fields come in the first part of your format table, right below “Metadata”, whereas the line item fields come in the second part, below the word “Table”.
There will only be one section “Metadata”, where you can enter all the header fields you require, but there can be one or more tables, where you can enter all the line item fields you require.
To add a table, simply click on the last row, which says “Table name”, and enter the name of the table.