SharePoint vs M-Files: The Solution For AP Efficiency & Purchase Order Automation in Tucson

Creating competencies in your business processes is a pivotal first stage toward digital switch-over, back-office innovation, and supplying your company an edge in a growingly aggressive professional landscape.

Concrete systems and fragmented processes with bottlenecks make synergy, efficacy, transparency, and liability to partners quite complicated.

By means of accounts payable digitization, you may implement dematerialized systems into your business and streamline workflows like purchase requests, invoicing, payment processing, procurement, and data entry processes.

Automating these types of organizational workflows produces more efficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), greater cost reductions, and improved utilization of your human resources.

Included in this guide, we’re examining a couple of the most popular tools used for AP productivity and purchase requisition digitization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our objective is to help you select the right tech stack and cooperate so you may develop and accelerate your AP digital revamping.

But prior to beginning our product analysis, let’s discuss what purchase order automation is and how it creates further capability for your AP operations.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the process of utilizing business tools with machine learning (ML), robotic technology, and artificial intelligence (AI) to digitize the purchase order process and its synonymous tasks.

Through digitization, purchase requests could be spontaneously forwarded to the fitting company to begin the approval routine. Then, once the requisition is authorized, it is mechanically transmitted to the vendor.

Though this may not seem like much at first read, automating the procurement procedure removes the requirement for a by-hand process, paper-based arrangements, and simplifies the standard laborious workflow.

As an example, with purchase order software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform, you can produce digital purchase orders that vendors can acknowledge and then have the details automatically integrated into your accounting tool.

This seemingly minuscule ability substantially streamlines the workflow, dramatically diminishes the requirement for manual interference, and thus, improves productivity within your Accounts Payable department.

The Benefits of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We talked about a number of the benefits of AP mechanization in the previous chapter, but to guarantee that you get the point, let's break these benefits down in the simplest terms.

• Digitized data logging and storage

• Enhanced competence via extra digitization and less by-hand meddling

• Improved precision due to less manual faults

• Greater transparency into procedures via automated processes

• Actual-time reporting, analytics, and auditing to continue to improve efficiencies

• Reformed logistics chain and vendor connections and self-managed portal

• Enhanced aptitude to oversee for protection and amenability

So now that we’ve reviewed what AP and purchase order automation is, how it operates, and why it’s significant, let’s start our platform assessment on Sharepoint vs M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

Coming in this section, we’re reviewing a fundamental analysis between the costing and capabilities of SharePoint as well as M-Files, followed by a deeper dive on their AP and purchase requisition mechanization potential.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

While this section provides a good standard side-by-side comparison, it doesn’t inform us on how these solutions administer tasks namely electronic purchase order. So in this next chapter, we’re giving a summary of each tool and how it handles this important operation.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is amongst the most widely known and established enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS tools, because of its close relation to other popular Microsoft tools like Excel, Outlook, and Word.

When it comes to purchase request automation, SharePoint sanctions you to address all the problems you could be facing with your existing, manual purchase requisition scheme.

Order Tracking

To start, by utilizing Microsoft SharePoint and integrating Office 365 applications, personnel can oversee purchase requisitions at all level from request approvals to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also enable your business to adapt your electronic purchase order scheme to your particular directions and requirements.

Components you could custom tailor within SharePoint include the format of the purchase request forms, multi-level approvals, role assignments, line items, and filters based on location, type, payment terms, and more.

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 could also facilitate correspondence across departments. As soon as the PO procedure has started, SharePoint can prompt a mechanized email to all respective groups to inform them that the process has begun and once more when it’s accomplished.

Interactive Dashboards

One more significant component of automation is the foresight into efficiency and workflow perceptibility. SharePoint delivers this by authorizing you to supervise purchase request progress with an interactive dashboard.

Via the dashboard framework, you could track purchase requisition history across divisions, view the analysis of approval vs denial proportion, and follow the position of ongoing POs.

Robust Integrations

SharePoint also provides great versatility in that it can work with with most solutions between departments for greater synergy.

For instance, if a division submits a purchase requisition for a network printer; when the order is processed, SharePoint can automatically develop an entry in your finance tool for the new IT resource.

Now that we’ve learned about what SharePoint is capable of in terms of assisting you in automating your AP processes, let’s proceed to M-Files.

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a powerful enterprise content management (ECM) solution that provides both on-premise, cloud solutions, or a hybrid version depending on your company needs.

Its interface is based off of the Windows Explorer web engine making it easy to figure out and perform for parties that are accustomed to the Windows operating system.

Moreover, M-Files provides advanced functionality that enables organizations to mechanize operations and processes such as purchase requisition automation. Let’s study those competencies.

Input

With M-Files you could acquire invoices from main or distributed sites and mechanize the collection of essential data associated with your purchase order and confirmation undertaking.

Data entry

As an extension of the input capability, M-Files empowers clients to distinguish and withdraw details from purchase order areas to facilitate the mechanization and transmission process. Furthermore, M-Files enables you to input any pertinent business regulations, validation terms and contains directory searches to help ensure accuracy across the operation.

Matching and coding

As a cutting-edge functional scope, M-Files could execute conforming of POs and GL coding of non-PO billing statements in your ERP procedure to simplify organization and transmission.

Mechanized approvals

The M-Files system can manage and automate as much of the confirmation process as you wish. This involves handling, queues, routing, response, and aging reports. Any purchase request that falls short of the authorization course can be revised manually and then reinstated into the automation flow for approval.

Automatic storage of approved POs

Once approval has been granted, purchase requests can be forwarded to finance spontaneously to conclude processing and storage in a primary repository.

How Wave Can Aid You in Executing Your Purchase Order Automation Platform in Tucson

Holding your organization cutthroat nowadays requires simplifying your operations and uprooting the hindrances from your systems that work to diminish your capability and output. Moreover, it requires picking the right business tools to achieve your calculated growth objectives.

At Wave, we can help by analyzing the fundamental aspects of your organization and with incremental digital switch-over and organizational system automation, reform them.

We apply a consolidation of innovations appertaining to your organizational requirements to digitize your repetitive tasks around capturing, arranging, and cataloging data so that it's uncomplicated to find and use whenever, from any location.

We can help you to custom-tailor your AP automation tool to satisfy your organization’s particular requirements and we gladly collaborate with more than 60 industry-recognized ECM and DMS solutions including M-Files, SharePoint, OpenText, and Oracle.

If you’d like to discover more, connect with us today and we can arrange a time to chat.