SharePoint vs M-Files: The Solution For AP Productivity & Purchase Order Automation in Long Beach

Generating efficiencies in your business workflows is a critical opening stage toward digital conversion, back-office innovation, and granting your business an upper hand in a growingly cutthroat professional industry.

Tangible operations and fragmented processes with impasses make synergy, efficacy, perceptibility, and liability to partners notably complex.

Through accounts payable digitization, you could carry out cloud-based systems into your company and expedite duties like purchase orders, procurement, invoicing, payment processing, and data entry workflows.

Digitizing these kinds of organizational processes produces more capacity in enterprise resource planning (ERP), greater expenditure cuts, and enhanced employment of your human resources.

Within this guide, we’re examining two of the most prevalent tools used for AP productivity and purchase requisition mechanization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our objective is to aid you in selecting the right solutions stack and partner so you can develop and speed up your AP digital switch-over.

But prior to starting our product assessment, let’s do a quick review of what purchase request automation is and how it generates higher productivity for your AP workflows.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the concept of utilizing business software with robotic technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to mechanize the purchase order operation and its synonymous undertakings.

Through digitization, purchase requests may be automatically transmitted to the fitting team to initiate the approval process. After, immediately after the request is confirmed, it is instinctively forwarded to the vendor.

While this may not look like much at first glance, mechanizing the purchasing operation removes the necessity for a by-hand process, paper-based schemes, and streamlines the often laborious workflow.

As an example, with purchase order solution or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, you can develop digital purchase orders that suppliers can identify followed by having the information spontaneously integrated into your accounting software.

This superficially minuscule capability substantially simplifies the system, drastically lessens the need for by-hand meddling, and consequently, improves proficiency inside your Accounts Payable department.

The Benefits of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We talked about a number of the benefits of AP mechanization in the former section, but to be certain that you understand, let's break these benefits down in plain language.

• Automated data entry and storage

• Greater competence through further digitization and less human intervention

• Improved precision because of less manual error

• Increased visibility into operations with your digitized workflows

• Actual-time auditing, reporting, and analytics to uphold the development of capacities

• Reformed logistics chain and supplier connections and self-service portal

• Enhanced aptitude to oversee for security and amenability

Now that we’ve reviewed what AP and purchase order automation is, how it works, and why it’s significant, let’s get into our platform review 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 analysis between the pricing and capabilities of SharePoint as well as M-Files, and then a deeper dive on their AP and purchase order mechanization capabilities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

While this section gives a good general simultaneous analogy, it doesn’t inform us on how these tools manage tasks such as electronic purchase order. Therefore in this succeeding section, we’re providing a synopsis of each solution and how it handles this significant operation.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is amongst the most prominent and accepted enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS tools, because of its deep connection with diverse popular Microsoft solutions like Word, Excel, and Outlook.

When it comes to purchase request mechanization, SharePoint enables you to handle each one of the issues you might be confronting with your present-day, manual purchase requisition system.

Order Tracking

To start, by employing Microsoft SharePoint and combining Office 365 applications, team members may track purchase orders at all stage from request confirmations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also empower your company to adapt your automated purchase requisition scheme to your particular instructions and requirements.

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

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 may also promote correspondence across departments. Once the PO operation has begun, SharePoint could prompt a mechanized email to all appropriate parties to alert them that the process has commenced and again once it’s carried out.

Interactive Dashboards

A further important aspect of digitization is the insight into efficiency and workflow transparency. SharePoint enables this by allowing you to monitor purchase request progress with an interactive dashboard.

With the dashboard system, you may monitor purchase requisition history across departments, distinguish the analysis of approval vs denial ratio, and track the position of POs in progress.

Robust Integrations

Furthermore, SharePoint enables superb adaptability in that it can integrate with most programs among departments for improved collaboration.

For example, if a branch delivers a purchase order for a network printer; once the requisition is handled, SharePoint can automatically develop an entry in your finance tool for the new IT asset.

Now that we’ve learned about what SharePoint can accomplish in terms of assisting you in automating your AP processes, let’s proceed to M-Files.

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a robust enterprise content management (ECM) system that offers both on-site, cloud solutions, or a hybrid version depending on your organizational needs.

Its interface is based off of the Windows Explorer web browser making it simple to figure out and execute for teams that are used to the Windows operating system.

Furthermore, M-Files grants innovative functionality that empowers businesses to digitize workflows and processes like purchase request automation. Let’s examine those capabilities.

Input

With M-Files you can gather invoices from primary or allocated sites and digitize the collection of important data linked to your purchase order and approval processes.

Data entry

In addition to the input aptitude, M-Files empowers customers to pinpoint and extract information from purchase order domains to facilitate the mechanization and conveying process. Additionally, M-Files allows you to input any relevant organizational regulations, validation specifications and contains archive searches to assist in ensuring accuracy across the operation.

Matching and coding

As an advanced feature-set, M-Files can execute conforming of POs and GL coding of non-PO statements in your ERP operation to streamline organization and routing.

Automated approvals

The M-Files system can regulate and automate as much of the approval process as you wish. This involves handling, routing, response, queues, and aging accounts. Any purchase requisition that fails the authorization procedure can be corrected by hand and then reinstated into the mechanization flow for approval.

Automatic storage of approved POs

After validation has been granted, purchase requisitions can be forwarded to finance automatically to conclude handling and storage in a primary cache.

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

Keeping your organization fierce today requires rationalizing your processes and removing the hindrances from your undertakings that work to diminish your capability and productivity. It also involves picking the appropriate business tools to accomplish your strategic growth objectives.

At Wave, we can be of assistance by studying the essential aspects of your organization and via step-by-step digital transformation and company process automation, transform them.

We use a blended set of technology appertaining to your company necessities to automate your repetitive tasks around collecting, organizing, and registering data so that it's easy to find and use at any time, from anywhere.

We can help you to custom-tailor your AP automation solution to fulfill your organization’s precise requirements and we gladly work with upwards of 60 industry-acknowledged ECM and DMS tools including SharePoint, OpenText, M-Files, and Oracle.

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