SharePoint vs M-Files: The Solution For AP Proficiency & Purchase Order Automation in Irving

Generating capabilities in your organizational processes is a crucial first phase toward digital switch-over, back-office innovation, and granting your business an advantage in an increasingly aggressive professional landscape.

Concrete arrangements and incoherent systems with bottlenecks make cooperation, productivity, visibility, and liability to partners very complex.

With accounts payable mechanization, you may carry out cloud-based arrangements into your business and simplify duties like purchase requests, procurement, invoicing, payment processing, and data entry workflows.

Mechanizing these types of organizational workflows creates more capacity in enterprise resource planning (ERP), greater cost savings, and reformed employment of your personnel.

Within this handbook, we’re reviewing two of the most prevalent tools designed for AP efficiency and purchase requisition digitization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our goal is to aid you in selecting the proper tech stack and collaborate so you may expand and expedite your AP digital switch-over.

But before we begin with our product review, let’s do a quick review of what purchase request automation is and how it produces higher capability for your AP operations.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the concept of employing business solutions via artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotic technology to digitize the purchase order operation and its related undertakings.

By means of digitization, purchase orders may be automatically transmitted to the relevant party to begin the authorization process. After, immediately after the order is authorized, it is automatically transmitted to the merchant.

Though this may not appear to be significant at first glance, automating the procurement procedure eliminates the necessity for a manual process, tangible systems, and streamlines the usual laborious workflow.

As an example, with purchase request software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, you can produce automated purchase orders that contractors can comprehend followed by having the data mechanically incorporated into your accounting tool.

This superficially minor aptitude significantly simplifies the process, remarkably reduces the requirement for manual meddling, and thus, improves efficiency inside your Accounts Payable department.

The Perks of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We talked about various of the benefits of AP mechanization in the former chapter, but to be certain that you get the point, let's dissect these advantages in absolute terms.

• Automated data entry and storage

• Improved efficiency through more automation and less human meddling

• Improved reliability on account of less manual faults

• Enhanced perceptibility into procedures via mechanized processes

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

• Improved distribution chain and merchant relationships and self-managed portal

• Improved ability to monitor for protection and compliance

Since we’ve gone over what AP and electronic purchase order is, how it functions, and why it’s significant, let’s get into our platform evaluation on Sharepoint versus M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

Within this chapter, we’re reviewing a fundamental breakdown between the costing and competencies of SharePoint as well as M-Files, followed by an in-depth analysis on their AP and purchase request automation potential.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

While this portion gives a good standard side-by-side comparison, it doesn’t inform us on how these programs administer workflows namely purchase order automation. Thus in this succeeding section, we’re giving an overview of each solution and how it administers this important undertaking.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is amongst the most recognized and accepted enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS platforms, due to its close relation to diverse popular Microsoft tools like Outlook, Word, and Excel.

As it relates to purchase requisition digitization, SharePoint enables you to address the entirety of problems you may be facing with your present-day, physical purchase requisition system.

Order Tracking

To initiate, by using Microsoft SharePoint and integrating Office 365 programs, personnel can monitor purchase orders at any phase from request confirmations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also enable your company to customize your digital purchase order system to your particular directions and necessities.

Elements you could individualize within SharePoint involve the template of the purchase request forms, multi-level approvals, role assignments, line items, and filters appertaining to location, type, payment terms, and more.

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 can also promote communication between divisions. Once the PO procedure has commenced, SharePoint can prompt a mechanized email to all respective parties to notify them that the procedure has begun and once more as soon as it’s complete.

Interactive Dashboards

A further critical aspect of mechanization is the clarity into productivity and workflow visibility. SharePoint provides this by authorizing you to supervise purchase order progress through an interactive dashboard.

Through the dashboard system, you may track purchase requisition history across sections, see the evaluation of approval vs denial percentage, and follow the state of ongoing POs.

Powerful Integrations

SharePoint also offers superb versatility in that it can incorporate with most programs across departments for increased cooperation.

For instance, if a department presents a purchase order for a network printer; as soon as the requisition is actioned, SharePoint can spontaneously generate an entry in your finance tool for the new IT asset.

Now that we’ve discussed what SharePoint is capable of in terms of helping you automate your AP tasks, let’s move on 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 company requirements.

Its interface is modeled off the Windows Explorer web engine making it convenient to learn and perform for parties that are comfortable with the Windows ecosystem.

Moreover, M-Files offers state-of-the-art functionality that enables organizations to mechanize operations and processes suchlike purchase order automation. Let’s take a look at those competencies.

Input

With M-Files you may acquire invoices from main or distributed locations and digitize the gathering of important data related to your purchase request and confirmation undertaking.

Data entry

As a continuation of the input capability, M-Files empowers clients to distinguish and withdraw data from purchase request areas to facilitate the mechanization and conveying process. Furthermore, M-Files permits you to input any pertinent organizational rules, validation terms and contains archive lookups to assist in guaranteeing accuracy throughout the process.

Matching and coding

As a state-of-the-art feature-set, M-Files can execute corresponding of POs and GL coding of non-PO invoices in your ERP system to streamline structure and transmission.

Digitized approvals

The M-Files solution can control and mechanize as much of the confirmation workflow as you want. This involves handling, response, queues, routing, and aging records. Any purchase request that fails the validation process can be corrected physically and then reinstated into the mechanization flow for approval.

Automatic storage of approved POs

After validation has been granted, purchase orders can be sent to finance mechanically to wrap up handling and storage in a central repository.

How Wave Can Help You Implement Your Purchase Order Automation Platform in Irving

Keeping your organization competitive nowadays means streamlining your processes and uprooting the impasses from your undertakings that mitigate your proficiency and output. Moreover, it requires picking the right business systems to achieve your calculated growth aims.

At Wave, we can help by examining the essential elements of your organization and with gradual digital transformation and organizational workflow automation, revamp them.

We use a blended set of innovations based on your company needs to digitize your repetitive workflows around gathering, regulating, and filing data so that it's easy to find and use whenever, from any location.

We can be of assistance in individualizing your AP digitization software to satisfy your business's precise demands and we willingly work with over 60 industry-accepted ECM and DMS tools including M-Files, SharePoint, OpenText, and Oracle.

If you’d like to discover more, reach out today and we can arrange a time to chat.