SharePoint vs M-Files: The Tool For AP Productivity & Purchase Order Automation in Norfolk

Developing capabilities in your business processes is a crucial opening step toward digital switch-over, back-office innovation, and giving your organization an advantage in a growingly aggressive professional sector.

Concrete operations and incoherent systems with bottlenecks make cooperation, productivity, perceptibility, and responsibility to partners very complicated.

With accounts payable mechanization, you could implement paperless arrangements into your business and expedite tasks like purchase orders, procurement, invoicing, payment processing, and data logging processes.

Automating these kinds of organizational workflows produces more proficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), better expenditure cuts, and improved employment of your manpower.

Included in this manual, we’re reviewing a duo of the most famous tools used for AP proficiency and purchase order automation: SharePoint and M-Files. Our objective is to help you select the right tech stack and cooperate so you may augment and expedite your AP digital switch-over.

But prior to beginning our product analysis, let’s talk through what purchase request mechanization is and how it creates higher capability for your AP operations.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the concept of using business tools through artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotic technology to automate the purchase order process and its synonymous undertakings.

Via digitization, purchase requests may be spontaneously forwarded to the relevant team to initiate the validation routine. After, immediately after the order is approved, it is automatically sent to the merchant.

Although this may not appear to be significant at first glance, automating the purchasing operation abolishes the need for a by-hand process, materialized systems, and simplifies the usual time-consuming workflow.

For example, with purchase request software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, you can develop electronic purchase orders that vendors can acknowledge and then have the details spontaneously incorporated into your accounting software.

This presumably small aptitude greatly simplifies the workflow, drastically reduces the requirement for by-hand intervention, and consequently, enhances proficiency within your Accounts Payable section.

The Advantages of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We discussed various of the benefits of AP digitization in the former portion, but just to make sure you get the idea, let's dissect these advantages in the simplest terms.

• Digitized data logging and storage

• Enhanced efficiency via further mechanization and less manual meddling

• Enhanced reliability on account of less human faults

• Greater visibility into procedures with your mechanized processes

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

• Reformed logistics chain and merchant relationships and self-service portal

• Enhanced aptitude to oversee for safety and compliance

Now that we’ve reviewed what AP and electronic purchase order is, how it operates, and why it’s vital, let’s begin our platform review on Sharepoint vs M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

In this section, we’re going to first take a look at a straightforward evaluation between the rate and capabilities of SharePoint along with M-Files, followed by an extensive review on their AP and purchase requisition automation capabilities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

Though this chapter provides a fine conventional side-by-side evaluation, it doesn’t educate us on how these programs manage processes such as digital purchase order. Thus in this succeeding portion, we’re providing a synopsis of each program and how it administers this essential undertaking.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is one of the most prominent and established enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS solutions, due to its strong association with other famed Microsoft solutions like Word, Excel, and Outlook.

In the context of purchase requisition automation, SharePoint sanctions you to resolve the entirety of issues you could be facing with your present-day, by-hand purchase request scheme.

Order Tracking

To start, by using Microsoft SharePoint and incorporating Office 365 applications, staff may monitor purchase orders at any stage from request approvals to delivery.

Customization

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

Components you may personalize within SharePoint include the format of the purchase request forms, role assignments, line items, multi-level approvals, and filters attributed to type, payment terms, location, and more.

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 could also further connection across divisions. Once the PO operation has commenced, SharePoint can prompt an automated email to all relevant groups to alert them that the process has commenced and once more when it’s carried out.

Interactive Dashboards

A further critical component of mechanization is the foresight into productivity and workflow transparency. SharePoint delivers this by authorizing you to monitor purchase request progress through an interactive dashboard.

Via the dashboard framework, you can monitor purchase requisition history throughout sections, view the breakdown of approval vs denial percentage, and follow the status of ongoing POs.

Powerful Integrations

Furthermore, SharePoint enables great adaptability in that it can integrate with most tools among departments for improved synergy.

Such as, if a branch presents a purchase order for a network printer; as soon as the requisition is actioned, SharePoint can mechanically generate an entry in your finance solution for the new IT resource.

Now that we’ve discussed what SharePoint is capable of in terms of aiding you in digitizing your AP workflows, let’s move on to M-Files.

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a powerful enterprise content management (ECM) solution that offers both on-site, cloud solutions, or a hybrid variant contingent on your company needs.

Its interface is modeled off the Windows Explorer web browser making it convenient to learn and execute for teams that are used to the Windows interface.

Additionally, M-Files provides innovative functionality that empowers businesses to mechanize operations and processes such as purchase request automation. Let’s examine those capabilities.

Input

With M-Files you can acquire invoices from main or distributed sites and digitize the ingestion of significant data linked to your purchase order and approval undertaking.

Data entry

In addition to the input capability, M-Files allows users to distinguish and withdraw data from purchase order areas to promote the digitization and transmission process. Additionally, M-Files permits you to input any relevant organizational regulations, confirmation details and includes database lookups to assist in ensuring veracity across the procedure.

Matching and coding

As a cutting-edge feature-set, M-Files could carry out corresponding of POs and GL coding of non-PO billing statements in your ERP system to streamline structure and transmission.

Digitized approvals

The M-Files system can regulate and automate as much of the confirmation procedure as you wish. This contains overseeing, routing, response, queues, and aging reports. Any purchase request that flunks the approval procedure can be amended by hand and then put back into the mechanization flow for authorization.

Automatic storage of approved POs

As soon as validation has been granted, purchase requisitions can be sent to finance mechanically to conclude handling and storage in a central repository.

How Wave Can Aid You in Executing Your Purchase Order Automation Solution in Norfolk

Holding your business competitive nowadays involves simplifying your operations and uprooting the impasses from your systems that decrease your proficiency and productivity. Moreover, it involves selecting the proper business tools to achieve your calculated growth objectives.

At Wave, we can assist by analyzing the essential aspects of your business and via step-by-step digital transformation and business workflow automation, revamp them.

We use a combination of solutions in accordance with your company requirements to automate your laborious tasks around collecting, organizing, and cataloging data so that it's uncomplicated to locate and access whenever, from wherever.

We can be of assistance in individualizing your AP mechanization software to fulfill your business's particular requirements and we happily collaborate with over 60 industry-acknowledged ECM and DMS solutions including M-Files, SharePoint, OpenText, and Oracle.

If you’re ready to learn more, connect with us today and we can set up a time to chat.