NOTE: This article applies to the Aura Digital Workforce product.

Question

What are Work Units? and how are they applied?

Answer

A Work Unit (also called Credits) is a measure of ‘work’ performed by the Aura Digital Worker bot.

Work Unit credits are applied (allocated) to your license on the date of purchase (or date of download for Community Edition). Additional Work Units can be purchased at any time to increase work allowances for the Aura Digital Worker Bots and Drones.

Community Edition - This Edition comes with work units (see product page for amount provided). If you need more work units for Community Edition, you can contact us at https://cognillo.com/support to request additional work units or to increase allowed document extractions (these could be at no cost if used strictly for testing purposes).

Professional & Enterprise Editions - These are paid Production licenses and have an annual subscription cost. These licenses also include work units, (see product page for details).
You may purchase additional work units anytime by contacting us here.

Additional work units - can be purchased for any of the Editions above (Community, Professional, Enterprise) by contacting us here.
Depending on the number of work units purchased, the cost will range from $10 to $5 USD per 1000 work units. Please contact us for a quotation.

Can you give an example of how much an automation can cost?

As an example, for RPA Challenge automation, which has 10 web screens and 10 Excel rows, equivalent to inputting 10 contacts into a website, costs ~15 to 30 work units.

1 work unit is used for each detection when UI is changed.

Details of RPA Challenge Usage

First web screen in RPA Challenge, Aura detects UI = 1 work unit.
Aura loops and does this 10 times for each contact.
Aura may need to redetect screen additional times if elements on screen change.

Additional work units will be used if a page is redetected more than 1 time due to screen changes (such as refresh or clicking a combobox changes the UI that needs to redetect to click item in combobox).

How are Work Units deducted?

1 Work Unit is used for every UI (User Interface) screen that needs detection.
- Example: Entering values into a screen with 1 or more textboxes and buttons uses 1 Work Unit credit by default.
- Each time the UI changes and Aura must detect controls again, this costs 1 additional work unit for that ‘re-detection’.
See table below for breakdown of Work Unit costs.

	Cognillo Hosted**	Customer Hosted ***
Function	Cost in Work Units	Cost in Work Units	Description
Machine Learning Screen Change Detection	1	1	Used to detect screen text and controls in user interface. If the UI changes, a redetection occurs and will use work units as listed here.
Extracting from Web page (Azure Form Recognizer)*	5 per page	1	If using the ‘Extract from’ command, and Microsoft Azure Form Recognizer option is enabled, Aura will extract all text, table data and key-value pairs from a web page, and automatically generate variables for them. This could be a web page or any application with data that must be extracted, such as a web form.
Extracting from Web page (Base64)*	30 per detection	1 per detection	If using the ‘Extract from’ command, and Base64 option is enabled, Aura will extract all text, table data and key-value pairs from a web page, and automatically generate variables for them. This could be a web page or any application with data that must be extracted, such as a web form. (Base64 only) Credits increase if the extracted content is more complex such ACORD or tax forms.
Getting Table Data / Extraction (Azure Form Recognizer)*	5 per detection	1 per detection	If the ‘Get Datatables’ command is used, and Microsoft Azure Form Recognizer option is enabled, this will auto detect all tables on the UI and store them as datatable variables.
Getting Table Data / Extraction (Base64)*	30 per detection	1 per detection	If the ‘Get Datatables’ command is used, and Base64 option is enabled, this will auto detect all tables on the UI and store them as datatable variables.
PDF & Image Extraction (Azure Form Recognizer)*	5 per page	1 per file	Used to detect all text in PDFs and Images, providing user with key & value pairs automatically. This also automatically creates datatables from tables in a PDF or Image.
PDF & Image Extraction (Base64)*	30 per page	1 per file	Used to detect all text in PDFs and Images, providing user with key & value pairs automatically. This also automatically creates datatables from tables in a PDF or Image. (Base64 only) Credits increase if the extracted content is more complex such ACORD or tax forms.
All other commands	0	0	All other commands used for automations do not use additional work units.

* Microsoft Azure Form Recognizer & Base64.ai - By default, both Azure Form Recognizer and Base64 options are used for optimal results.
** Cognillo Hosted - (Default) Microsoft Azure Form Recognizer and Base64.ai are provided through Cognillo hosted services.

*** Customer Hosted - (Available only with Professional & Enterprise Editions) Customer subscribes to Microsoft Azure Form Recognizer and/or Base64.ai subscription services directly and inputs the endpoints from their subscription into the Aura Worker(s).

How can we reduce Work Unit credits used?

You can significantly reduce the number of Work Unit credits used by purchasing the Professional or Enterprise versions of the Aura Digital Workforce product and subscribing to Microsoft Azure Form Recognizer and/or Base64.ai subscription services directly.
See below to set up “Customer Hosted“. You can modify these options in the Aura Digital Worker robot to start saving credits for document/image/UI extraction:

If you need further assistance, please contact us.

What are Work Units?