SharePoint vs M-Files: The Platform For AP Proficiency & Purchase Order Automation in Memphis

Generating competencies in your company workflows is a pivotal initial step toward digital switch-over, back-office upgrading, and supplying your organization an edge in a progressively competitive professional landscape.

Concrete operations and fragmented workflows with bottlenecks make collaboration, productivity, visibility, and liability to shareholders quite complicated.

Through accounts payable automation, you could achieve dematerialized operations into your organization and streamline duties like purchase requests, invoicing, payment processing, procurement, and data entry processes.

Mechanizing these types of company workflows generates more capacity in enterprise resource planning (ERP), better cost savings, and enhanced application of your human resources.

Within this handbook, we’re reviewing a duo of the most famous platforms designed for AP efficiency and purchase requisition digitization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our objective is to help you select the right toolset and partner so you can develop and speed up your AP digital transformation.

But before we begin with our product review, let’s do a quick review of what purchase request automation is and how it creates greater productivity for your AP processes.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the concept of employing business software via robotic technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to mechanize the purchase requisition system and its synonymous tasks.

Via digitization, purchase orders can be automatically transmitted to the relevant company to begin the authorization procedure. Later, as soon as the order is authorized, it is instinctively forwarded to the merchant.

While this may not look like much at first glance, digitizing the procurement process removes the necessity for a by-hand process, materialized systems, and simplifies the often time-consuming workflow.

As an example, with purchase requisition solution or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, you can produce electronic purchase requests that suppliers can identify and then have the information automatically fused into your accounting software.

This superficially minuscule aptitude greatly simplifies the process, remarkably diminishes the demand for by-hand intervention, and thus, amplifies efficiency through your Accounts Payable section.

The Perks of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We discussed various of the benefits of AP mechanization in the preceding chapter, but just to make sure you understand, let's break these benefits down in the simplest terms.

• Digitized data entry and storage

• Greater efficiency with further automation and less human interference

• Improved accuracy due to less manual error

• Enhanced transparency into procedures through your mechanized processes

• Actual-time reporting, analytics, and auditing to uphold the development of efficiencies

• Reformed supply network and supplier relationships and self-managed portal

• Improved capability to oversee for protection and conformity

So now that we’ve discussed what AP and digital purchase order is, how it operates, and why it’s important, let’s begin our platform assessment on Sharepoint vs M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

Within this chapter, we’re reviewing a fundamental evaluation between the pricing and capabilities of SharePoint along with M-Files, and then an in-depth analysis on their AP and purchase requisition automation qualities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

While this section presents a decent standard neck-and-neck comparison, it doesn’t educate us on how these tools administer workflows such as digital purchase order. So in this following chapter, we’re providing a synopsis of each program and how it administers this essential task.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

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

In the context of purchase requisition automation, SharePoint enables you to address the entirety of problems you might be facing with your current, physical purchase order scheme.

Order Tracking

To start, by using Microsoft SharePoint and integrating Office 365 tools, staff could monitor purchase orders at all level from request authorizations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also allow your company to customize your digital purchase order scheme to your specific directions and necessities.

Components you could custom tailor within SharePoint include the layout of the purchase requisition forms, line items, multi-level approvals, role assignments, and filters appertaining to type, payment terms, location, and more.

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 could also facilitate correspondence across divisions. As soon as the PO operation has commenced, SharePoint can trigger a mechanized email to all appropriate teams to notify them that the process has commenced and once more as soon as it’s complete.

Interactive Dashboards

A further critical aspect of automation is the clarity into efficiency and workflow perceptibility. SharePoint enables this by permitting you to oversee purchase order progress via an interactive dashboard.

Via the dashboard system, you could monitor purchase order history among departments, see the breakdown of approval vs denial proportion, and follow the status of ongoing POs.

Powerful Integrations

SharePoint also enables great flexibility in that it can integrate with most solutions across departments for greater synergy.

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

Now that we’ve discussed what SharePoint can do in terms of aiding you in digitizing your AP workflows, let’s continue to M-Files.

M-Files Overview

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

Its interface is modeled off the Windows Explorer web engine making it simple to understand and execute for departments that are used to the Windows operating system.

Furthermore, M-Files offers advanced functionality that enables organizations to automate tasks and processes suchlike purchase requisition automation. Let’s take a look at those capabilities.

Input

With M-Files you may acquire invoices from main or allocated sites and automate the ingestion of essential data linked to your purchase order and confirmation processes.

Data entry

In addition to the input aptitude, M-Files allows customers to pinpoint and pull out information from purchase request domains to expedite the mechanization and routing process. Additionally, M-Files allows you to input any appropriate company regulations, confirmation details and contains directory lookups to assist in ensuring veracity during the procedure.

Matching and coding

As an advanced functionality, M-Files can execute corresponding of POs and GL coding of non-PO billing statements in your ERP procedure to simplify organization and transmission.

Digitized approvals

The M-Files platform can regulate and automate as much of the authorization procedure as you wish. This includes managing, queues, routing, response, and aging records. Any purchase request that flunks the validation course can be amended by hand and then put back into the digitization flow for approval.

Automatic storage of approved POs

After authorization has been issued, purchase requisitions can be forwarded to finance spontaneously to conclude processing and storage in a central repository.

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

Holding your organization cutthroat today involves rationalizing your processes and uprooting the impasses from your workflows that mitigate your capability and output. It also means selecting the appropriate business tools to complete your calculated growth goals.

At Wave, we can help by examining the fundamental elements of your company and via incremental digital switch-over and business workflow automation, transform them.

We apply a combination of innovations appertaining to your company requirements to automate your laborious processes around collecting, arranging, and cataloging data so that it's uncomplicated to find and use whenever, from any location.

We can be of assistance in individualizing your AP mechanization tool to fit your business's specific demands and we willingly collaborate with more than 60 industry-acknowledged ECM and DMS tools including OpenText, M-Files, SharePoint, and Oracle.

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