Customizing Rossum: The Schema Configuration Guide

The main challenge we all run into when processing invoices is diversity – no matter that it is usually welcomed in our lives for bringing a refreshing vibe, it is quite a hassle in data capture. Be it varying layouts, multiple channels used for sending to your company or different requirements on what data you need to have in your company’s accounting system. All such needs should be accommodated. At Rossum, we are fully aware of this challenge and support the configuration of your Rossum account to fit your needs. And what’s more – you can be in full control of it yourself.

Introduction

When you create a Rossum trial account, it comes with a default set of settings. You will start with one admin user, one workspace and one queue. In case you didn’t go through our configuration tutorial, let us briefly explain the basic terms before we dive deeper into the topic:

Organization – a basic unit that contains all the objects described below.

Schema – a set of data points that are extracted from the documents. (These are the fields you can see in your Rossum sidebar.) One queue always has one schema.

Queue – a basic organization unit. When you send a document to Rossum app you have to send it to a specific queue. For each queue you can setup a list of data fields that you want to extract. The default schema comes with one queue for received invoices. For Rossum users, one queue often represents a container for one type of documents.

User – an individual user of the app. Every user is assigned to an organization. The user who created your Rossum account is set as the admin user by default and can access document annotations from all queues, assign users to queues, and many other rights.

Workspace – queues may be grouped into workspaces. Workspaces are usually used as one accounting unit.

To configure these aspects of your Rossum account, you can look at the web interface (we are busy adding all the remaining bits of settings there), but for any of these items, you can also use the rossum command line tool. Specific tutorials may be found in our collection of developer guides. (And of course, true hackers can also use our API directly.)

In this article, we will focus on one of the most frequent adjustments –changing the configuration of fields to be captured from documents, the Rossum schema.

Changing the schema via UI

You can find your Settings button in the sidebar under the Report a problem button. Here you will find a list of all available fields with pre-checked options for those that are already included in your rossum. Set up your schema by choosing the right options and save your choice. The change will affect all the invoices in the queue, including the exported ones.

We have now also added a dedicated schema editor, allowing you to configure names and formats of data fields you want to extract, necessary value constraints, and more. To access the schema editor, simply go to the Workspaces & Queues settings screen and select a queue, then click on the “Edit schema” button in the upper right corner.

To read more about editing an extraction schema, see our Help Center article.

If you would like to add some extra fields, you can do so using Rossum.

Changing the schema programmatically

If you are using API and want to change the schema programmatically, you can do so by updating a queue schema via Rossum API directly.

Or, if you prefer using a command line tool, check out this article. You can also read more on how to add a custom field or a custom dropdown select box field using the rossum command line tool.