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

Developing capabilities in your company operations is a pivotal initial phase toward digital conversion, back-office modernization, and supplying your organization an edge in an increasingly aggressive professional landscape.

Tangible operations and incoherent workflows with bottlenecks make collaboration, efficiency, perceptibility, and liability to stakeholders quite complicated.

By means of accounts payable automation, you may implement dematerialized arrangements into your business and expedite workflows like purchase orders, payment processing, procurement, invoicing, and data entry processes.

Mechanizing these forms of business processes creates more proficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), better expenditure cuts, and enhanced utilization of your manpower.

Included in this handbook, we’re reviewing a couple of the most famous platforms designed for AP productivity and purchase requisition mechanization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our target is to assist you in selecting the proper solutions stack and partner so you may expand and speed up your AP digital transformation.

But before we begin with our product analysis, let’s talk through what purchase order mechanization is and how it creates higher productivity for your AP workflows.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

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

Through mechanization, purchase requisitions may be automatically forwarded to the fitting company to begin the validation procedure. Later, once the request is approved, it is automatically sent to the vendor.

Though this may not appear to be significant at first glance, mechanizing the purchasing operation abolishes the necessity for a physical process, materialized schemes, and expedites the standard time-consuming workflow.

For instance, with purchase order software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform, you can produce digital purchase requisitions that contractors can comprehend followed by having the details mechanically integrated into your accounting tool.

This seemingly minor aptitude substantially simplifies the process, remarkably reduces the demand for by-hand interference, and thus, amplifies productivity inside your Accounts Payable section.

The Advantages of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We covered several of the gains of AP mechanization in the former portion, but just to make sure you understand, let's dissect these advantages in absolute terms.

• Digitized data input and storage

• Greater efficiency via extra mechanization and less human meddling

• Improved reliability on account of less manual blunders

• Increased transparency into systems through your mechanized processes

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

• Reformed logistics network and supplier affinities and self-managed portal

• Greater aptitude to oversee for safety and amenability

So now that we’ve gone over what AP and digital purchase order is, how it functions, and why it’s significant, let’s begin our software assessment on Sharepoint vs M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

Within this portion, we’re examining a fundamental breakdown between the pricing and aptitudes of SharePoint along with M-Files, succeeded by a deeper dive on their AP and purchase requisition digitization qualities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

Though this chapter gives a fine general side-by-side comparison, it doesn’t educate us on how these programs administer workflows such as digital purchase order. Therefore in this following portion, we’re giving a summary of each solution and how it manages this significant operation.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is one of the more prominent and established enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS tools, owing to its close relation to diverse prevalent Microsoft programs like Excel, Outlook, and Word.

In the context of purchase requisition digitization, SharePoint enables you to resolve all the issues you might be facing with your current, physical purchase request arrangement.

Order Tracking

To begin, by using Microsoft SharePoint and integrating Office 365 programs, personnel can oversee purchase orders at any stage from request confirmations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also enable your business to tailor your automated purchase order system to your specific instructions and requirements.

Elements you can individualize within SharePoint involve the layout of the purchase order forms, line items, multi-level approvals, role assignments, and filters appertaining to payment terms, location, type, and more.

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 could also facilitate communication across sectors. Once the PO process has begun, SharePoint can prompt a mechanized email to all respective teams to alert them that the operation has begun and again once it’s complete.

Interactive Dashboards

One more important component of automation is the insight into capability and workflow perceptibility. SharePoint delivers this by allowing you to oversee purchase requisition progress through an interactive dashboard.

Via the dashboard framework, you may track purchase order history across departments, distinguish the analysis of approval vs denial ratio, and follow the position of ongoing POs.

Powerful Integrations

Moreover, SharePoint enables terrific versatility in that it can work with with most programs among departments for greater cooperation.

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

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

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a vigorous enterprise content management (ECM) tool that offers both local, cloud solutions, or a hybrid variant depending on your business needs.

Its interface is based off of the Windows Explorer web browser making it convenient to figure out and execute for departments that are comfortable with the Windows interface.

Moreover, M-Files offers advanced functionality that enables businesses to digitize tasks and processes suchlike purchase requisition automation. Let’s take a look at those competencies.

Input

With M-Files you may gather invoices from primary or allocated areas and mechanize the gathering of significant data related to your purchase order and confirmation workflows.

Data entry

In addition to the input aptitude, M-Files enables users to pinpoint and withdraw information from purchase order fields to facilitate the digitization and conveying process. Furthermore, M-Files allows you to input any appropriate business regulations, approval details and contains database searches to assist in guaranteeing precision throughout the procedure.

Matching and coding

As an advanced functionality, M-Files could perform matching of POs and GL coding of non-PO invoices in your ERP system to simplify structure and transmission.

Digitized approvals

The M-Files platform can regulate and automate as much of the authorization workflow as you wish. This contains handling, response, queues, routing, and aging reports. Any purchase order that falls short of the validation course can be amended manually and then restored into the digitization flow for authorization.

Automatic storage of approved POs

As soon as validation has been accepted, purchase requests can be forwarded to finance automatically to wrap up development and storage in a main repository.

How Wave Can Help You Implement Your Purchase Order Automation Tool in Sacramento

Keeping your company fierce today means rationalizing your operations and removing the impasses from your workflows that mitigate your capability and output. It also means choosing the proper business systems to complete your calculated growth aims.

At Wave, we can assist by studying the essential pieces of your company and with incremental digital transformation and business workflow automation, reform them.

We utilize a blended set of technology in accordance with your organizational requirements to automate your laborious tasks around collecting, organizing, and filing data so that it's easy to track down and use at any time, from anywhere.

We can be of assistance in individualizing your AP mechanization tool to satisfy your company’s precise demands and we gladly go along with upwards of 60 industry-accepted ECM and DMS platforms including M-Files, SharePoint, OpenText, and Oracle.

If you’d like to discover more, connect with us today and we can schedule a time to chat.