SharePoint vs M-Files: The Platform For AP Productivity & Purchase Order Automation in Scottsdale

Developing competencies in your business workflows is a crucial initial phase toward digital conversion, back-office modernization, and giving your business an advantage in a progressively aggressive professional industry.

Tangible systems and incoherent workflows with bottlenecks make collaboration, efficiency, visibility, and liability to stakeholders very difficult.

Through accounts payable automation, you may implement cloud-based arrangements into your organization and streamline duties like purchase requisitions, payment processing, procurement, invoicing, and data entry workflows.

Digitizing these types of organizational workflows produces more capacity in enterprise resource planning (ERP), greater cost savings, and reformed employment of your manpower.

In this guide, we’re reviewing a duo of the most famous solutions designed for AP efficiency and purchase requisition mechanization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our target is to help you select the appropriate solutions stack and cooperate so you can expand and speed up your AP digital switch-over.

But prior to beginning our product review, let’s do a quick review of what purchase request automation is and how it produces higher productivity for your AP operations.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

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

By means of digitization, purchase orders could be automatically sent to the appropriate party to begin the authorization process. Then, immediately after the requisition is approved, it is instinctively sent to the merchant.

Although this may not look like much at first glance, digitizing the purchasing procedure eliminates the requirement for a physical process, materialized arrangements, and expedites the standard laborious workflow.

For instance, with purchase request software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool, you can create digital purchase requisitions that suppliers can comprehend followed by having the data spontaneously incorporated into your accounting software.

This seemingly minor aptitude substantially expedites the workflow, drastically reduces the need for human interference, and consequently, enhances proficiency through your Accounts Payable division.

The Benefits of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We covered various of the benefits of AP digitization in the previous chapter, but to be certain that you get the point, let's dissect these advantages in the simplest terms.

• Digitized data logging and storage

• Greater productivity with extra mechanization and less by-hand interference

• Greater accuracy because of less manual faults

• Increased perceptibility into systems through your digitized tasks

• Real-time analytics, auditing, and reporting to uphold the development of performances

• Improved distribution chain and merchant affinities and self-service portal

• Enhanced aptitude to oversee for protection and compliance

So now that we’ve gone over what AP and purchase order automation is, how it operates, and why it’s vital, let’s begin our platform evaluation on Sharepoint as opposed to M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

Within this chapter, we’re going to first take a look at a basic breakdown between the pricing and capabilities of SharePoint and M-Files, succeeded by a deeper dive on their AP and purchase request mechanization capabilities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

Although this portion provides a decent standard simultaneous evaluation, it doesn’t inform us on how these tools manage workflows such as electronic purchase order. Thus in this succeeding section, we’re providing a synopsis of each program and how it handles this significant operation.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

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

When it comes to purchase order mechanization, SharePoint allows you to handle all the problems you may be experiencing with your existing, by-hand purchase requisition arrangement.

Order Tracking

To start, by employing Microsoft SharePoint and integrating Office 365 programs, personnel can monitor purchase requests at every phase from request confirmations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also enable your company to customize your automated purchase order arrangement to your particular guidelines and needs.

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

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 can also further connection across sectors. As soon as the PO operation has commenced, SharePoint could actuate a mechanized email to all respective groups to notify them that the operation has commenced and again once it’s accomplished.

Interactive Dashboards

A further important aspect of mechanization is the foresight into capability and workflow transparency. SharePoint delivers this by allowing you to supervise purchase order progress with an interactive dashboard.

Through the dashboard system, you can oversee purchase requisition history across divisions, view the breakdown of approval vs denial ratio, and follow the state of existing POs.

Vigorous Integrations

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

For example, if a division delivers a purchase request for a network printer; as soon as the order is actioned, SharePoint can spontaneously generate an entry in your finance tool for the new IT asset.

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

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a vigorous enterprise content management (ECM) tool that presents both local, cloud solutions, or a hybrid version determined by your business requirements.

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

Moreover, M-Files provides innovative functionality that empowers businesses to automate workflows and processes such as purchase request automation. Let’s take a look at those aptitudes.

Input

With M-Files you could gather invoices from central or distributed locations and automate the ingestion of important data linked to your purchase order and confirmation processes.

Data entry

As a continuation of the input capability, M-Files enables users to identify and pull out details from purchase requisition domains to facilitate the automation and conveying process. Additionally, M-Files permits you to input any pertinent company codes, validation terms and contains database lookups to assist in ensuring veracity across the procedure.

Matching and coding

As an advanced feature-set, M-Files can execute corresponding of POs and GL coding of non-PO statements in your ERP procedure to facilitate arrangement and delivery.

Automated approvals

The M-Files system can regulate and mechanize as much of the approval workflow as you wish. This includes overseeing, routing, response, queues, and aging accounts. Any purchase request that falls short of the validation process can be corrected by hand and then reinstated into the automation flow for approval.

Automatic storage of approved POs

As soon as validation has been granted, purchase orders can be forwarded to finance automatically to wrap up processing and storage in a primary cache.

How Wave Can Aid You in Executing Your Purchase Order Automation Tool in Scottsdale

Holding your organization fierce these days requires rationalizing your processes and uprooting the hindrances from your workflows that mitigate your proficiency and output. It also requires choosing the appropriate business tools to achieve your calculated growth aims.

At Wave, we can help by analyzing the essential elements of your organization and through step-by-step digital transformation and organizational system automation, transform them.

We apply a blended set of innovations in accordance with your company necessities to mechanize your repetitive tasks around gathering, regulating, and filing data so that it's easy to locate and use whenever, from any location.

We can help you to custom-tailor your AP automation software to satisfy your organization’s precise demands and we gladly go along with more than 60 industry-recognized 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.