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

Generating competencies in your business workflows is a pivotal first stage toward digital transformation, back-office modernization, and supplying your organization an upper hand in a progressively aggressive professional industry.

Concrete operations and incoherent processes with impasses make collaboration, productivity, visibility, and accountability to stakeholders very difficult.

With accounts payable automation, you may implement dematerialized operations into your company and simplify workflows like purchase requisitions, payment processing, procurement, invoicing, and data logging processes.

Mechanizing these types of organizational operations generates more efficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), greater cost reductions, and improved employment of your personnel.

Within this manual, we’re evaluating a couple of the most famous tools designed for AP proficiency and purchase requisition digitization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our goal is to aid you in selecting the appropriate solutions stack and cooperate so you may augment and expedite your AP digital switch-over.

But prior to beginning our product review, let’s discuss what purchase order mechanization is and how it produces further capability for your AP operations.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

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

By means of mechanization, purchase orders could be spontaneously transmitted to the relevant party to start the authorization process. After, immediately after the requisition is approved, it is automatically sent to the merchant.

Although this may not look like much at first glance, automating the procurement operation abolishes the necessity for a physical process, materialized schemes, and expedites the usual time-consuming workflow.

For instance, with purchase request software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool, you can produce electronic purchase requisitions that suppliers can acknowledge at which point the information automatically fused into your accounting tool.

This seemingly minor aptitude significantly streamlines the workflow, remarkably lessens the demand for by-hand intervention, and thus, amplifies efficiency inside your Accounts Payable division.

The Perks of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We talked about various of the gains of AP automation in the previous section, but to guarantee that you get the idea, let's dissect these advantages in the simplest terms.

• Digitized data logging and storage

• Greater efficiency through more mechanization and less human meddling

• Enhanced precision on account of less physical faults

• Greater transparency into procedures through your mechanized processes

• Real-time reporting, analytics, and auditing to sustain the betterment of capacities

• Reformed supply process and merchant relationships and self-service portal

• Enhanced aptitude to regulate for security and conformity

Now that we’ve reviewed what AP and electronic purchase order is, how it functions, and why it’s significant, let’s start our product assessment on Sharepoint vs M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

Within this section, we’re going to first take a look at a basic evaluation between the costing and aptitudes of SharePoint along with M-Files, succeeded by an in-depth analysis on their AP and purchase requisition digitization capabilities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

Though this chapter presents a fine standard side-by-side evaluation, it doesn’t educate us on how these programs administer processes namely electronic purchase order. Therefore in this next chapter, we’re providing a synopsis of each solution and how it manages this essential task.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is one of the more widely known and endorsed enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS solutions, due to its close relation to different prevalent Microsoft programs like Outlook, Word, and Excel.

As it relates to purchase requisition digitization, SharePoint allows you to resolve each one of the problems you could be experiencing with your present-day, physical purchase request system.

Order Tracking

To begin, by using Microsoft SharePoint and combining Office 365 applications, personnel may monitor purchase orders at any level from request approvals to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also empower your company to adapt your digital purchase order arrangement to your particular directions and needs.

Elements you could personalize within SharePoint include the template 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 can also facilitate communication across sectors. As soon as the PO process has begun, SharePoint could trigger a mechanized email to all appropriate teams to notify them that the procedure has begun and again once it’s accomplished.

Interactive Dashboards

A further significant aspect of automation is the insight into capability and workflow visibility. SharePoint delivers this by authorizing you to oversee purchase requisition progress through an interactive dashboard.

With the dashboard framework, you could track purchase requisition history among divisions, see the analysis of approval vs denial percentage, and track the position of existing POs.

Vigorous Integrations

Furthermore, SharePoint provides great flexibility in that it can incorporate with most tools between departments for improved collaboration.

Such as, if a department submits a purchase requisition for a network printer; as soon as the requisition is handled, SharePoint can automatically produce an entry in your finance solution for the new IT resource.

Now that we’ve seen what SharePoint can do 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 adaptation determined by your company needs.

Its interface is derived from the Windows Explorer internet browser making it convenient to understand and perform for teams that are used to the Windows interface.

Furthermore, M-Files offers advanced functionality that empowers companies to automate tasks and processes suchlike purchase order automation. Let’s study those capabilities.

Input

With M-Files you can gather invoices from main or assigned sites and mechanize the collection of significant data associated with your purchase order and authorization processes.

Data entry

As an extension of the input competence, M-Files enables customers to pinpoint and pull out details from purchase requisition domains to expedite the automation and routing process. Furthermore, M-Files permits you to input any relevant company rules, approval terms and incorporates archive searches to assist in guaranteeing veracity throughout the process.

Matching and coding

As a cutting-edge functionality, M-Files may carry out conforming of POs and GL coding of non-PO invoices in your ERP operation to streamline structure and transmission.

Mechanized approvals

The M-Files solution can regulate and mechanize as much of the approval workflow as you want. This contains overseeing, routing, response, queues, and aging reports. Any purchase requisition that falls short of the authorization procedure can be corrected physically and then reinstated into the mechanization flow for authorization.

Automatic storage of approved POs

Once approval has been accepted, purchase requests can be forwarded to finance automatically to conclude handling and storage in a central cache.

How Wave Can Assist You in Enforcing Your Purchase Order Automation Solution in Houston

Keeping your business fierce today means rationalizing your procedures and eliminating the bottlenecks from your undertakings that work to diminish your proficiency and efficacy. Moreover, it requires choosing the appropriate business solutions to complete your calculated growth aims.

At Wave, we can be of assistance by examining the essential aspects of your organization and through gradual digital transformation and organizational workflow automation, revamp them.

We use a consolidation of solutions based on your business necessities to automate your repetitive processes around capturing, arranging, and cataloging data so that it's easy to track down and access whenever, from wherever.

We can assist you in customizing your AP automation software to fulfill your company’s specific requirements and we gladly work with upwards of 60 industry-acknowledged ECM and DMS solutions including M-Files, SharePoint, OpenText, and Oracle.

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