Setting up Microsoft Syntex PAYG to process receipts
At Ignite last year, SharePoint Syntex became Microsoft Syntex and there were a whole load of new announcements including things like Archival, Backup, bulk translation and digital signatures, all coming to Syntex. One of the smaller updates announced has now come into public preview and that is a change to the cost model with Pay As You Go pricing.
What is meant by Pay As You Go pricing?
With the new Microsoft Syntex billing model, instead of paying per user as the current model requires, you are billed per use of Syntex. In terms of content processing, this means that each document that is analysed, you will have a charge for each document. This means that if you only occasionally use Syntex, your bills will go down significantly but this also allows you to try out Syntex at a low cost too.
During the public preview, there is not cost at all for the document processing so this is an even better time to try Syntex out in your environments. At the time of writing, there is no confirmation on when the preview will end or what the cost will be at the end of the preview.
What can you do with Syntex?
The area I was interested in looking at was around the content processing. Syntex can process text related Office documents or images using two different engines. There is a around Syntex so I won't repeat that here. What I wanted to look at was one of the pre-built models that is designed for receipt processing.
This model requires no initial set up and machine teaching - that work has already been done by Microsoft. Instead, you can switch it on and point it at your documents in a SharePoint library and have it extract the default content.
Why would you use this?
For larger organisations, they will usually already have an expenses system such as SAP Concur that has image processing to extract information from receipts. However, smaller organisations may find it useful to process receipts automatically to reduce the pain of submitting expenses, using mobile devices to scan them and Power Automate to trigger an approval process.
There may be other, simpler scenarios where you want to process a set of receipts for other reasons such as capturing which vendors produce the most litter in an area. The bigger aim is to demonstrate how Syntex can be used to automate manual tasks.
Sharing how it works
I have recorded a video showing how it can be set up and the receipt model being put into place.
Thoughts
Microsoft Syntex adoption should increase dramatically with the use of this new model as it greatly simplifies the costs and gives organisation more control. However, the real proof will be what the costs actually are as a high cost will put off larger scale use of Syntex for a large organisation. Time will tell whether this easier adoption leads to a longer usage pattern but I certainly hope that it does.
Photo by Mike Walter on Unsplash