SharePoint vs M-Files: The Platform For AP Productivity & Purchase Order Automation in Dallas

Creating competencies in your business processes is a critical initial step toward digital transformation, back-office innovation, and giving your company an edge in a growingly competitive professional sector.

Paper-based systems and fragmented systems with bottlenecks make collaboration, efficacy, perceptibility, and responsibility to shareholders quite difficult.

With accounts payable digitization, you could implement paperless arrangements into your organization and simplify workflows like purchase requisitions, payment processing, procurement, invoicing, and data input processes.

Digitizing these forms of business operations generates more capacity in enterprise resource planning (ERP), higher cost savings, and improved employment of your manpower.

Within this guide, we’re reviewing two of the most popular tools geared toward AP efficiency and purchase order digitization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our target is to help you select the appropriate solutions stack and partner so you could expand and expedite your AP digital switch-over.

But prior to beginning our product review, let’s discuss what purchase order automation is and how it generates greater efficiency for your AP operations.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the concept of utilizing business tools through machine learning (ML), robotic technology, and artificial intelligence (AI) to automate the purchase request system and its corresponding workflows.

By means of mechanization, purchase requests could be automatically transmitted to the appropriate company to begin the approval process. Later, immediately after the order is confirmed, it is instinctively transmitted to the merchant.

Although this may not look like much at first glance, automating the purchasing process eliminates the requirement for a by-hand process, materialized systems, and expedites the often time-consuming workflow.

As an example, with purchase requisition software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, you can create digital purchase orders that vendors can identify at which point the details automatically incorporated into your accounting platform.

This presumably minuscule aptitude greatly simplifies the system, drastically lessens the demand for human meddling, and thus, amplifies proficiency within your Accounts Payable section.

The Benefits of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We discussed various of the advantages of AP automation in the preceding portion, but to guarantee that you understand, let's take these advantages apart in plain language.

• Digitized data logging and storage

• Enhanced productivity with further mechanization and less human interference

• Enhanced precision on account of less human faults

• Increased transparency into procedures via automated workflows

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

• Improved supply chain and supplier connections and self-operated portal

• Improved aptitude to oversee for protection and conformity

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

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

Within this portion, we’re examining a straightforward analysis between the rate and capabilities of SharePoint as well as M-Files, and then an in-depth analysis on their AP and purchase request mechanization capabilities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

Although this portion provides a decent standard neck-and-neck evaluation, it doesn’t tell us much about how these programs handle processes like purchase order automation. Therefore in this succeeding section, we’re going to do an overview of each solution and how it manages this essential undertaking.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is amongst the most widely known and accepted enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS solutions, owing to its strong association with different famed Microsoft tools like Word, Excel, and Outlook.

When it comes to purchase order digitization, SharePoint allows you to handle all the problems you might be confronting with your current, physical purchase request scheme.

Order Tracking

To start, by utilizing Microsoft SharePoint and integrating Office 365 tools, personnel may oversee purchase orders at every level from request confirmations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also enable your business to tailor your electronic purchase order system to your specific directions and needs.

Components you can custom tailor within SharePoint comprise of the template of the purchase order forms, role assignments, line items, multi-level approvals, and filters based on payment terms, location, type, and more.

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 could also further correspondence between divisions. When the PO operation has begun, SharePoint can prompt a mechanized email to all relevant parties to alert them that the process has begun and once more when it’s carried out.

Interactive Dashboards

A further significant component of mechanization is the insight into productivity and workflow transparency. SharePoint enables this by authorizing you to oversee purchase requisition progress through an interactive dashboard.

With the dashboard system, you could monitor purchase request history across sections, see the analysis of approval vs denial proportion, and follow the status of ongoing POs.

Robust Integrations

Furthermore, SharePoint enables great flexibility in that it can work with with most programs across departments for increased cooperation.

For example, if a department delivers a purchase order for a network printer; once the requisition is handled, SharePoint can spontaneously develop an entry in your finance solution for the new IT resource.

Now that we’ve seen what SharePoint can do in terms of helping you automate your AP workflows, let’s continue to M-Files.

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a powerful enterprise content management (ECM) solution that provides both local, cloud solutions, or a hybrid variant contingent on your business demands.

Its interface is based off of the Windows Explorer web browser making it convenient to learn and execute for departments that are accustomed to the Windows interface.

Moreover, M-Files provides advanced functionality that empowers organizations to automate operations and processes suchlike purchase request automation. Let’s study those competencies.

Input

With M-Files you can gather invoices from main or assigned sites and automate the gathering of significant data associated with your purchase requisition and confirmation processes.

Data entry

As a continuation of the input capability, M-Files allows clients to identify and pull out data from purchase request areas to expedite the mechanization and routing process. Moreover, M-Files enables you to input any pertinent organizational codes, confirmation specifications and incorporates archive lookups to help ensure accuracy across the operation.

Matching and coding

As an advanced functionality, M-Files may perform conforming of POs and GL coding of non-PO invoices in your ERP operation to simplify arrangement and routing.

Automated approvals

The M-Files platform can control and digitize as much of the approval process as you wish. This contains overseeing, response, queues, routing, and aging reports. Any purchase requisition that fails the approval course can be corrected by hand and then put back into the digitization flow for approval.

Automatic storage of approved POs

Once authorization has been accepted, purchase requests can be sent to finance automatically to finalize handling and storage in a main database.

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

Keeping your company competitive these days requires streamlining your operations and removing the impasses from your workflows that decrease your proficiency and output. Additionally, it requires picking the right business tools to achieve your strategic growth objectives.

At Wave, we can help by examining the foundational elements of your organization and via incremental digital conversion and organizational process automation, reform them.

We utilize a blended set of technology in accordance with your organizational necessities to mechanize your tedious workflows around capturing, organizing, and filing data so that it's simple to find and access whenever, from any location.

We can help you to custom-tailor your AP mechanization tool to fulfill your company’s particular requirements and we happily go along with more than 60 industry-recognized ECM and DMS solutions including M-Files, SharePoint, OpenText, and Oracle.

If you’re ready to learn more, reach out today and we can set up a time to chat.