OS-Cubed, Inc. created a "green" solution to expense reporting for the company.  Old expense reporting required a sheet to be filled out, and online form to be filled out and submitted, then the physical receipts mailed to a central office for cross checking.  This wasted valuable employee and review staff time, as well as increasing the carbon footprint as the physical receipts had to be copied and mailed.  Our solution allowed new expense reports to be uploaded to the ERP system directly and associated with an electronic expense report submission, using Microsoft Exchange and customer software.  This reduced carbon footprint and allowed expense checks to be turned around in approximately 1/10 the time it formerly took.

We created a hosted software solution that monitors a queue for incoming PDF files.  PDF files are created using a scanner to scan in a barcode page from an ERP system and expense receipts from an attached expense report.  The file is mailed to a specific mailbox in Exchange.  The attachment is stripped and droppled into a directory on the server.  Our software detects the new file is there, ocr's the contents of the PDF and determines the expense report ID number.  The file is then transferred to an import queue, and an XML document is created describing the file and giving the ID number and that file is placed in another directory.   The ERP queue then picks up these files and adds them to the ERP system for further processing.

The solution had the following requirements:
  Implement a "green" solution that would reduce wasted mail and paper expenses
  Be able to turn around expense reports in days instead of weeks
  Reduce employee paperwork involved in expense reporting
  Accurately provide a way for receipts to be cross-checked by bookeepers and auditors

The solution was provided on time, in budget and in scope.

The solution was developed using a combination of Exchange server, ocr and bar code recognition technologies, PDF reader technologies and Microsoft VB.NET.  The solution included a controller/configuration dashboard and a windows service.