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When processing invoices and purchase orders, you need to extract vendor and business unit addresses. Before such addresses can be exported to a back-end system, they should be parsed into the following components: Postal Code (ZIP Code), Country, City, and Street. For this purpose, FlexiCapture for Invoices includes an address parsing feature.
You do not need this feature if your Document Definition uses vendor and business unit databases, in which case the required addresses are taken from the corresponding database fields.

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Limitations

  • Address parsing requires the NLP module to be installed.
  • Only English and German addresses can be parsed. If the feature is used for addresses in unsupported languages, the corresponding fields may be populated incorrectly.
  • Enabling this feature may slow down document processing for certain document types and for very complicated addresses.

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Enable address parsing

By default, address parsing is disabled. To enable address parsing:
1

Open the Document Definition properties

Click Document Definition → Document Definition Properties….
2

Open the Document Definition settings

In the dialog box that opens, click the Document Definition Settings tab.
3

Open the Document Definition features

Under Additional Fields and Features, click Edit….
4

Enable address parsing

In the dialog box that opens, select Address Parsing.
Screenshot of the European Invoice Properties Document Definition Settings tab in ABBYY FlexiCapture for Invoices with the Document Definition Features dialog box open and the Address Parsing option selected.
As a result, vendor and business unit addresses in the Address field are parsed into the following components: Postal Code (ZIP Code), Country, City, and Street. The Street field may include additional information, such as house number, apartment number, and PO box. To parse other address fields, such as Ship To or Bill To, you need to create a custom rule (a sample script is provided in the “Address parsing” section of Sample scripts for creating custom rules). If your project uses vendor and business unit databases, the program first looks up the required addresses in these databases:
  • If the required address is found in the vendor or business unit database and has a high confidence score, the program exports the found address.
  • If the program fails to find the required address in the vendor or business unit database, or if the found address has a low confidence score, the program parses and exports the address captured from the image.

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Enable address parsing for projects from earlier versions

To enable address parsing for a project created in a version of the program earlier than ABBYY FlexiCapture Release 3 Update 4:
1

Update your project

Update your project.
2

Select the Address Parsing version

In the Document Definition Settings dialog box, select the Address Parsing version.
3

Create the BU rule chain

Create a rule chain from the new BU Address Parsing rule from the BU/Address field and from the old Business unit must be found in database rule from the BU group.
4

Create the Vendor rule chain

Create a rule chain from the new Vendor Address Parsing rule from the Vendor/Address field and from the old Vendor must be found in database rule from the Vendor group.
5

Enable the rules

Enable the BU Address Parsing and Vendor Address Parsing rules.