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

Developing capabilities in your company processes is a crucial first phase toward digital conversion, back-office modernization, and supplying your business an edge in a progressively cutthroat professional landscape.

Concrete operations and incoherent processes with logjams make synergy, efficacy, transparency, and responsibility to partners notably difficult.

By means of accounts payable mechanization, you can achieve dematerialized operations into your business and expedite duties like purchase requisitions, procurement, invoicing, payment processing, and data input tasks.

Automating these forms of organizational processes produces more capacity in enterprise resource planning (ERP), better cost reductions, and improved utilization of your human resources.

Within this handbook, we’re reviewing two of the most famous solutions geared toward AP productivity and purchase request automation: SharePoint and M-Files. Our objective is to assist you in selecting the proper tech stack and partner so you can develop and speed up your AP digital switch-over.

But prior to starting our product analysis, let’s talk through what purchase order automation is and how it produces higher efficiency for your AP workflows.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

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

Via digitization, purchase requisitions may be spontaneously transmitted to the appropriate team to begin the validation procedure. After, as soon as the requisition is confirmed, it is instinctively forwarded to the vendor.

Although this may not seem like much at first read, mechanizing the procurement operation abolishes the need for a physical process, tangible systems, and streamlines the usual laborious workflow.

For instance, with purchase request solution or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform, you can develop digital purchase orders that suppliers can identify at which point the details spontaneously integrated into your accounting software.

This seemingly minuscule aptitude substantially simplifies the workflow, remarkably reduces the requirement for human interference, and consequently, improves proficiency within your Accounts Payable section.

The Perks of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We discussed various of the benefits of AP automation in the preceding chapter, but to guarantee that you get the idea, let's dissect these advantages in the simplest terms.

• Automated data input and storage

• Enhanced efficiency through further automation and less human meddling

• Improved accuracy on account of less physical error

• Greater transparency into systems via automated processes

• Current-time reporting, analytics, and auditing to continue to improve performances

• Enhanced supply network and vendor relationships and self-service portal

• Improved capability to regulate for protection and amenability

So now that we’ve gone over what AP and electronic purchase order is, how it operates, and why it’s vital, let’s start our software evaluation on Sharepoint vs M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

In this chapter, we’re reviewing a straightforward analysis between the costing and aptitudes of SharePoint and M-Files, followed by a deeper dive on their AP and purchase order automation qualities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

Though this section provides a good conventional side-by-side comparison, it doesn’t inform us on how these solutions administer workflows like digital purchase order. Therefore in this next portion, we’re giving a synopsis of each solution and how it administers this essential task.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is amongst the most prominent and accepted enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS solutions, due to its strong association with other popular Microsoft programs like Excel, Outlook, and Word.

In the context of purchase order mechanization, SharePoint enables you to address all the issues you might be facing with your current, physical purchase order scheme.

Order Tracking

To begin, by employing Microsoft SharePoint and combining Office 365 tools, personnel may monitor purchase requisitions at every stage from request confirmations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also empower your business to tailor your digital purchase request system to your particular instructions and necessities.

Aspects you could personalize within SharePoint comprise of the layout of the purchase order forms, line items, multi-level approvals, role assignments, and filters attributed to location, type, payment terms, and more.

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 could also facilitate connection across departments. Once the PO operation has commenced, SharePoint can trigger a mechanized email to all appropriate groups to notify them that the process has started and once more as soon as it’s complete.

Interactive Dashboards

One more significant component of digitization is the foresight into efficiency and workflow transparency. SharePoint enables this by authorizing you to oversee purchase order progress via an interactive dashboard.

Via the dashboard framework, you can oversee purchase requisition history among sections, see the evaluation of approval vs denial ratio, and track the status of ongoing POs.

Powerful Integrations

Furthermore, SharePoint provides superb flexibility in that it can incorporate with most programs across departments for increased collaboration.

For example, if a department delivers a purchase order for a network printer; when the requisition is processed, SharePoint can automatically develop an entry in your finance software for the new IT asset.

Now that we’ve seen what SharePoint can do in terms of assisting you in automating your AP tasks, let’s proceed 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 determined by your company requirements.

Its interface is derived from the Windows Explorer web engine making it easy to learn and execute for departments that are accustomed to the Windows interface.

Additionally, M-Files provides state-of-the-art functionality that allows companies to automate workflows and processes like purchase request automation. Let’s study those capabilities.

Input

With M-Files you could acquire invoices from primary or distributed areas and mechanize the collection of significant data related to your purchase request and confirmation processes.

Data entry

As an extension of the input competence, M-Files enables users to distinguish and withdraw information from purchase request domains to facilitate the digitization and conveying process. Furthermore, M-Files permits you to input any pertinent company regulations, confirmation details and incorporates directory lookups to help ensure accuracy during the process.

Matching and coding

As a cutting-edge functional scope, M-Files could execute matching of POs and GL coding of non-PO invoices in your ERP procedure to facilitate organization and delivery.

Mechanized approvals

The M-Files solution can control and mechanize as much of the approval process as you want. This contains overseeing, routing, response, queues, and aging accounts. Any purchase request that fails the validation course can be corrected manually and then put back into the mechanization flow for authorization.

Automatic storage of approved POs

After validation has been accepted, purchase requests can be transmitted to finance automatically to conclude processing and storage in a primary cache.

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

Keeping your organization competitive these days means streamlining your procedures and uprooting the hindrances from your undertakings that mitigate your capability and productivity. Moreover, it means selecting the proper business solutions to achieve your tactical growth objectives.

At Wave, we can help by examining the essential pieces of your organization and via incremental digital switch-over and business process automation, transform them.

We use a consolidation of innovations in accordance with your company needs to digitize your tedious tasks around gathering, organizing, and cataloging data so that it's easy to track down and access whenever, from wherever.

We can help you to custom-tailor your AP digitization software to fulfill your organization’s specific needs and we willingly collaborate with over 60 industry-acknowledged ECM and DMS solutions including M-Files, SharePoint, OpenText, and Oracle.

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