SharePoint vs M-Files: The Tool For AP Efficiency & Purchase Order Automation in Fremont

Developing competencies in your organizational workflows is a crucial initial stage toward digital conversion, back-office modernization, and supplying your company an advantage in an increasingly aggressive professional industry.

Tangible operations and disjointed workflows with bottlenecks make collaboration, productivity, perceptibility, and accountability to partners quite complex.

By means of accounts payable digitization, you can implement paperless systems into your business and streamline workflows like purchase orders, invoicing, payment processing, procurement, and data input workflows.

Mechanizing these forms of organizational processes generates more proficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), greater expenditure cuts, and improved utilization of your human resources.

In this guide, we’re reviewing a duo of the most famous solutions used for AP efficiency and purchase order mechanization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our objective is to help you select the appropriate tech stack and collaborate so you may develop and speed up your AP digital revamping.

But prior to starting our product review, let’s talk through what purchase order mechanization is and how it creates further productivity for your AP operations.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the notion of using business software through robotic technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to digitize the purchase requisition process and its related undertakings.

By means of digitization, purchase orders may be spontaneously forwarded to the fitting party to initiate the authorization procedure. Later, once the request is authorized, it is mechanically sent to the merchant.

Though this may not look like much at first glance, mechanizing the purchasing operation abolishes the need for a by-hand process, paper-based arrangements, and streamlines the often labor-intensive workflow.

As an example, with purchase requisition software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool, you can create digital purchase requisitions that vendors can acknowledge at which point the details mechanically fused into your accounting tool.

This superficially minuscule ability substantially streamlines the process, drastically diminishes the need for by-hand interference, and therefore, amplifies productivity inside your Accounts Payable division.

The Advantages of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We covered various of the gains of AP digitization in the previous chapter, but to guarantee that you understand, let's break these benefits down in absolute terms.

• Digitized data input and storage

• Greater efficiency with more mechanization and less manual interference

• Enhanced accuracy because of less human blunders

• Enhanced visibility into operations through your digitized workflows

• Real-time analytics, auditing, and reporting to continue to improve performances

• Improved distribution network and supplier connections and self-managed portal

• Greater ability to regulate for safety and conformity

So now that we’ve reviewed what AP and purchase order automation is, how it functions, and why it’s important, let’s start our software review on Sharepoint versus M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

Within this section, we’re reviewing a fundamental breakdown between the rate and capabilities of SharePoint as well as M-Files, followed by an extensive review on their AP and purchase request automation potential.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

Although this section gives a fine general side-by-side evaluation, it doesn’t tell us much about how these tools handle workflows namely digital purchase order. So in this next section, we’re providing a synopsis of each solution and how it administers this important undertaking.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is one of the more recognized and endorsed enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS solutions, because of its deep connection with different prevalent Microsoft tools like Excel, Outlook, and Word.

In the context of purchase requisition digitization, SharePoint enables you to resolve the entirety of concerns you could be experiencing with your current, by-hand purchase request arrangement.

Order Tracking

To initiate, by utilizing Microsoft SharePoint and combining Office 365 programs, staff could oversee purchase requisitions at all level from request confirmations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also empower your company to tailor your automated purchase order system to your specific instructions and necessities.

Aspects you may custom tailor within SharePoint involve the format of the purchase requisition forms, multi-level approvals, role assignments, line items, and filters based on type, payment terms, location, and more.

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 could also promote connection among divisions. When the PO operation has started, SharePoint could trigger a mechanized email to all appropriate parties to alert them that the operation has started and again once it’s complete.

Interactive Dashboards

One more critical aspect of automation is the clarity into efficiency and workflow visibility. SharePoint enables this by permitting you to monitor purchase requisition progress via an interactive dashboard.

Through the dashboard framework, you may track purchase requisition history throughout divisions, distinguish the breakdown of approval vs denial proportion, and monitor the status of existing POs.

Vigorous Integrations

SharePoint also offers superb flexibility in that it can work with with most tools among departments for increased cooperation.

Such as, if a department presents a purchase requisition for a network printer; once the request is handled, SharePoint can mechanically develop an entry in your finance solution for the new IT asset.

Now that we’ve learned about what SharePoint can do in terms of helping you automate your AP processes, let’s proceed to M-Files.

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a vigorous enterprise content management (ECM) system that provides both local, cloud solutions, or a hybrid version contingent on your organizational requirements.

Its interface is derived from the Windows Explorer web engine making it easy to learn and implement for parties that are comfortable with the Windows ecosystem.

Additionally, M-Files offers state-of-the-art functionality that allows businesses to mechanize tasks and processes like purchase requisition automation. Let’s take a look at those aptitudes.

Input

With M-Files you could capture invoices from primary or distributed locations and mechanize the collection of important data linked to your purchase requisition and authorization processes.

Data entry

In addition to the input capability, M-Files empowers users to distinguish and extract information from purchase requisition domains to facilitate the mechanization and routing process. Additionally, M-Files enables you to input any pertinent organizational codes, confirmation specifications and includes archive searches to assist in ensuring precision during the process.

Matching and coding

As an advanced functionality, M-Files may carry out matching of POs and GL coding of non-PO invoices in your ERP operation to facilitate structure and delivery.

Mechanized approvals

The M-Files platform can control and mechanize as much of the authorization workflow as you desire. This involves managing, response, queues, routing, and aging accounts. Any purchase request that flunks the authorization procedure can be corrected by hand and then put back into the automation flow for validation.

Automatic storage of approved POs

After validation has been granted, purchase requests can be sent to finance mechanically to finalize handling and storage in a central cache.

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

Holding your business competitive today means simplifying your processes and removing the bottlenecks from your systems that work to diminish your efficiency and productivity. Additionally, it involves picking the right business systems to accomplish your calculated growth objectives.

At Wave, we can assist by examining the fundamental pieces of your company and through incremental digital switch-over and company workflow automation, transform them.

We apply a combination of solutions in accordance with your company needs to digitize your tedious workflows around capturing, arranging, and registering data so that it's simple to locate and access whenever, from any location.

We can help you to custom-tailor your AP automation solution to fit your company’s precise demands and we gladly collaborate with upwards of 60 industry-acknowledged ECM and DMS solutions including OpenText, M-Files, SharePoint, and Oracle.

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