Ingredients

• Database: Microsoft SharePoint list to store extracted invoice data.
• OCR data extraction: Cradl AI’s AI-powered OCR models for fast, flexible and accurate data extraction.
• Orchestration: Power Automate to connect Cradl AI with SharePoint.
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Configure a SharePoint List for data storage

We're using invoices as our document type in this tutorial, so we'll create a SharePoint list with columns matching the fields we'd typically extract from invoices. Below is an example setup. The Status column is not an extracted item, but can be added to use this flow for automating invoice approval workflow.

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Here's the empty list inside Sharepoint:

Automating data extraction from PDFs with Cradl AI

Customising an AI Model

Cradl AI makes it incredibly simple to extract, validate and export data. Before we begin, make sure you’ve created a free Cradl AI account.‍

Once you’re logged into Cradl AI, create your first AI model with just a few clicks. In this example, I’ll clone and tweak the Invoice model to keep things simple, but creating a model from scratch works just as well for other documents. Cradl AI also makes it easy to extract data from tables or automate document classification.
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Extract data from your first document

Invoices can be imported into Cradl AI via email, automation tools like Power Automate, or APIs. To keep things brief, we're going with manual upload in this guide:

1. Upload your document(s) from the Cradl AI dashboard, and wait for your AI model to process them.
2. Once processed, you can review the extracted data and make corrections (if necessary) before exporting the document to Power Automate.

Enable Cradl AI's Power Automate integration

Integrating Cradl AI with Power Automate is super simple:

1. Choose Power Automate from the list of Export options.
2. Copy the JSON Schema. We'll paste it into our trigger in Power Automate.

As for the Power Webhook URL input field - we'll come back to Cradl AI once we've got the URL from our Power Automate trigger.

Power Automate workflow steps

The Power Automate flow consists of just two steps: triggering the the flow from Cradl AI, and use the extracted data to create a new item in the SharePoint list.

1. Trigger the flow

• Select Instant cloud flow when you create a new flow, and choose the When a HTTP Request is received trigger from Request
• Paste the JSON schema from Cradl AI into the Request Body JSON Schema text box.
• Set Who can trigger the flow to Anyone.
• Save the flow to generate the HTTP URL. Copy it, then go back to Cradl AI and paste it into the Webhook URL input field.

2. Connect to SharePoint

• Choose the Create item action from SharePoint.
• Populate the parameters with the dynamic values from the Cradl AI JSON Schema.

Next steps

Now that your data extraction workflow is set up, you can extend it further. Incorporate this flow into an invoice approval process by adding approval steps in Power Automate, or integrating with accounting systems. You can also enhance automation by connecting additional document types, setting up automatic imports via email, and much more.