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

Creating capabilities in your business operations is a crucial opening stage toward digital switch-over, back-office innovation, and giving your organization an edge in a growingly competitive professional industry.

Tangible operations and disjointed systems with logjams make collaboration, efficiency, transparency, and liability to partners quite complicated.

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

Digitizing these types of company processes produces more efficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), better cost savings, and enhanced utilization of your human resources.

Included in this manual, we’re examining a couple of the most popular solutions geared toward AP proficiency and purchase request automation: SharePoint and M-Files. Our goal is to aid you in selecting the right toolset and partner so you can develop and accelerate your AP digital revamping.

But before we begin with our product assessment, let’s discuss what purchase order mechanization is and how it generates further capability for your AP workflows.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the notion of using business software via machine learning (ML), robotic technology, and artificial intelligence (AI) to mechanize the purchase requisition process and its synonymous workflows.

By means of digitization, purchase requests can be mechanically forwarded to the fitting team to start the approval procedure. After, once the order is confirmed, it is automatically sent to the vendor.

While this may not seem like much at first read, automating the buying procedure eliminates the need for a manual process, materialized arrangements, and streamlines the often time-consuming workflow.

As an example, with purchase requisition software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, you can produce digital purchase requests that contractors can comprehend at which point the data mechanically incorporated into your accounting software.

This superficially small ability substantially streamlines the system, drastically reduces the need for by-hand intervention, and therefore, enhances productivity inside your Accounts Payable department.

The Advantages of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We covered a number of the gains of AP digitization in the preceding chapter, but to guarantee that you get the point, let's dissect these advantages in absolute terms.

• Automated data entry and storage

• Enhanced efficiency via further automation and less by-hand interference

• Enhanced reliability because of less human error

• Greater transparency into systems via mechanized workflows

• Actual-time reporting, analytics, and auditing to sustain the betterment of performances

• Improved distribution network and vendor connections and self-operated portal

• Improved aptitude to oversee for safety and conformity

Now that we’ve gone over what AP and electronic purchase order is, how it works, and why it’s important, let’s start our platform evaluation on Sharepoint versus M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

In this portion, we’re reviewing a straightforward analysis between the rate and aptitudes of SharePoint along with M-Files, and then an extensive review on their AP and purchase order automation potential.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

Though this portion gives a fine conventional simultaneous comparison, it doesn’t tell us much about how these tools manage workflows such as digital purchase order. Therefore in this next portion, we’re giving a synopsis of each solution and how it handles this important task.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is amongst the most prominent and endorsed enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS solutions, owing to its close relation to different famed Microsoft solutions like Excel, Outlook, and Word.

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

Order Tracking

To begin, by employing Microsoft SharePoint and combining Office 365 programs, personnel could track purchase orders at any stage from request authorizations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also enable your business to customize your electronic purchase order arrangement to your specific instructions and needs.

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

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 could also facilitate correspondence among departments. When the PO operation has commenced, SharePoint could trigger an automated email to all appropriate groups to inform them that the operation has begun and again once it’s complete.

Interactive Dashboards

Another important component of automation is the clarity into productivity and workflow visibility. SharePoint enables this by authorizing you to supervise purchase requisition progress with an interactive dashboard.

Through the dashboard framework, you can monitor purchase order history throughout sections, distinguish the evaluation of approval vs denial ratio, and monitor the state of POs in progress.

Powerful Integrations

Moreover, SharePoint offers great flexibility in that it can integrate with most programs between departments for improved synergy.

For example, if a department presents a purchase request for a network printer; as soon as the requisition is processed, SharePoint can mechanically generate an entry in your finance software for the new IT resource.

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

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a robust enterprise content management (ECM) tool that provides both on-site, cloud solutions, or a hybrid version depending on your business demands.

Its interface is based off of the Windows Explorer web engine making it easy to learn and implement for teams that are used to the Windows operating system.

Moreover, M-Files offers advanced functionality that enables organizations to automate tasks and processes like purchase request automation. Let’s take a look at those aptitudes.

Input

With M-Files you could capture invoices from primary or distributed locations and automate the gathering of important data associated with your purchase request and approval processes.

Data entry

As an extension of the input capability, M-Files allows users to identify and pull out information from purchase requisition fields to promote the digitization and conveying process. Additionally, M-Files permits you to input any appropriate company rules, approval details and incorporates archive lookups to help ensure veracity during the procedure.

Matching and coding

As an advanced functional scope, M-Files could carry out corresponding of POs and GL coding of non-PO billing statements in your ERP operation to facilitate organization and delivery.

Digitized approvals

The M-Files solution can manage and mechanize as much of the approval process as you desire. This involves overseeing, response, queues, routing, and aging accounts. Any purchase order that flunks the authorization process can be revised by hand and then restored into the digitization flow for authorization.

Automatic storage of approved POs

After validation has been issued, purchase requisitions can be sent to finance automatically to finalize processing and storage in a primary cache.

How Wave Can Assist You in Enforcing Your Purchase Order Automation Tool in Miami

Keeping your company cutthroat these days means simplifying your procedures and eliminating the bottlenecks from your undertakings that work to diminish your proficiency and productivity. Additionally, it means choosing the proper business solutions to complete your strategic growth objectives.

At Wave, we can assist by examining the foundational elements of your business and with gradual digital conversion and organizational workflow automation, transform them.

We use a combination of technology in accordance with your business requirements to mechanize your tedious processes around capturing, regulating, and filing data so that it's simple to find and access at any time, from anywhere.

We can assist you in customizing your AP automation tool to satisfy your company’s precise demands and we gladly collaborate with over 60 industry-acknowledged ECM and DMS platforms including OpenText, M-Files, SharePoint, and Oracle.

If you’re interested in learning more, reach out today and we can arrange a time to chat.