SharePoint vs M-Files: The Solution For AP Productivity & Purchase Order Automation in Gilbert

Developing capabilities in your business operations is a pivotal initial phase toward digital conversion, back-office innovation, and giving your business an upper hand in a progressively competitive professional sector.

Tangible operations and fragmented systems with bottlenecks make collaboration, efficiency, perceptibility, and responsibility to stakeholders notably complicated.

With accounts payable mechanization, you can achieve paperless arrangements into your organization and streamline tasks like purchase orders, procurement, invoicing, payment processing, and data entry workflows.

Digitizing these types of business processes generates more efficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), greater expenditure cuts, and reformed application of your manpower.

Included in this manual, we’re reviewing a couple of the most prevalent platforms designed for AP productivity and purchase request mechanization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our objective is to assist you in selecting the proper tech stack and cooperate so you may expand and accelerate your AP digital transformation.

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

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the concept of employing business tools with artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotic technology to digitize the purchase order process and its related workflows.

Via automation, purchase requests could be automatically forwarded to the relevant party to initiate the approval routine. After, as soon as the requisition is authorized, it is automatically transmitted to the supplier.

Although this may not appear to be significant at first glance, mechanizing the procurement operation abolishes the requirement for a manual process, tangible systems, and expedites the usual labor-intensive workflow.

For instance, with purchase request software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform, you can create automated purchase requests that vendors can identify followed by having the data automatically incorporated into your accounting software.

This seemingly minuscule ability significantly streamlines the system, dramatically diminishes the need for by-hand meddling, and therefore, improves productivity within your Accounts Payable division.

The Benefits of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We covered various of the gains of AP automation in the former chapter, but to guarantee that you get the point, let's break these benefits down in the simplest terms.

• Automated data logging and storage

• Enhanced efficiency with extra automation and less human interference

• Greater precision on account of less manual error

• Greater transparency into systems with your mechanized tasks

• Current-time analytics, auditing, and reporting to uphold the development of capacities

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

• Improved capability to regulate for protection and amenability

So now that we’ve reviewed what AP and digital purchase order is, how it works, and why it’s vital, let’s begin our product evaluation on Sharepoint as opposed to M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

Coming in this portion, we’re going to first take a look at a basic evaluation between the costing and competencies of SharePoint as well as M-Files, followed by an in-depth analysis on their AP and purchase request digitization potential.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

While this chapter provides a good general simultaneous evaluation, it doesn’t inform us on how these solutions manage processes namely digital purchase order. Therefore in this following section, we’re providing a synopsis of each tool and how it administers this essential undertaking.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is one of the most widely known and accepted enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS tools, owing to its close relation to diverse prevalent Microsoft programs like Word, Excel, and Outlook.

As it relates to purchase requisition mechanization, SharePoint sanctions you to address the entirety of concerns you could be confronting with your existing, by-hand purchase order scheme.

Order Tracking

To start, by employing Microsoft SharePoint and combining Office 365 tools, team members may track purchase requests at all phase from request authorizations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also enable your organization to customize your electronic purchase order scheme to your specific instructions and necessities.

Aspects you could personalize within SharePoint include the template of the purchase requisition forms, role assignments, line items, multi-level approvals, and filters based on type, payment terms, location, and more.

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 can also facilitate communication among sectors. When the PO procedure has started, SharePoint could prompt an automated email to all appropriate groups to notify them that the operation has begun and once more when it’s accomplished.

Interactive Dashboards

Another significant aspect of automation is the foresight into efficiency and workflow visibility. SharePoint enables this by authorizing you to monitor purchase requisition progress through an interactive dashboard.

With the dashboard setup, you could oversee purchase order history throughout departments, see the evaluation of approval vs denial ratio, and follow the state of POs in progress.

Vigorous Integrations

Moreover, SharePoint offers superb adaptability in that it can work with with most tools among departments for greater synergy.

Such as, if a branch presents a purchase order for a network printer; when the request is actioned, SharePoint can spontaneously develop an entry in your finance tool for the new IT resource.

Now that we’ve seen what SharePoint is capable of in terms of helping you automate your AP processes, let’s continue to M-Files.

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a powerful enterprise content management (ECM) tool that presents both on-site, cloud solutions, or a hybrid adaptation contingent on your organizational demands.

Its interface is based off of the Windows Explorer web browser making it easy to figure out and implement for parties that are used to the Windows ecosystem.

Moreover, M-Files offers innovative functionality that enables businesses to automate workflows and processes such as purchase requisition automation. Let’s examine those aptitudes.

Input

With M-Files you can acquire invoices from main or distributed sites and mechanize the ingestion of significant data associated with your purchase request and approval undertaking.

Data entry

As an extension of the input aptitude, M-Files empowers customers to pinpoint and pull out data from purchase requisition fields to promote the automation and routing process. Moreover, M-Files allows you to input any relevant business regulations, validation details and incorporates archive lookups to help ensure veracity across the process.

Matching and coding

As a cutting-edge feature-set, M-Files could execute conforming of POs and GL coding of non-PO billing statements in your ERP system to simplify organization and routing.

Digitized approvals

The M-Files solution can regulate and automate as much of the confirmation workflow as you wish. This contains handling, response, queues, routing, and aging records. Any purchase request that flunks the approval procedure can be amended physically and then put back into the digitization flow for validation.

Automatic storage of approved POs

Once validation has been granted, purchase orders can be transmitted to finance automatically to wrap up development and storage in a central repository.

How Wave Can Help You Implement Your Purchase Order Automation Tool in Gilbert

Holding your business cutthroat these days requires streamlining your operations and removing the bottlenecks from your undertakings that mitigate your proficiency and productivity. Additionally, it involves picking the right business systems to achieve your tactical growth objectives.

At Wave, we can assist by examining the essential aspects of your organization and through step-by-step digital transformation and organizational system automation, reform them.

We use a combination of innovations appertaining to your company needs to digitize your laborious tasks around gathering, regulating, and registering data so that it's uncomplicated to find and utilize whenever, from wherever.

We can assist you in customizing your AP digitization software to satisfy your company’s particular needs and we happily collaborate with more than 60 industry-acknowledged ECM and DMS solutions including OpenText, M-Files, SharePoint, and Oracle.

If you’d like to discover more, contact us today and we can set up a time to chat.