SharePoint vs M-Files: The Solution For AP Efficiency & Purchase Order Automation in Portland

Creating capabilities in your organizational operations is a crucial first stage toward digital switch-over, back-office innovation, and granting your business an upper hand in a growingly competitive professional industry.

Paper-based operations and disjointed processes with logjams make synergy, efficacy, transparency, and accountability to stakeholders very complicated.

Through accounts payable automation, you could implement dematerialized arrangements into your company and streamline tasks like purchase orders, payment processing, procurement, invoicing, and data logging processes.

Mechanizing these kinds of company workflows generates more proficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), greater expenditure cuts, and reformed employment of your manpower.

In this manual, we’re reviewing a couple of the most prevalent solutions geared toward AP productivity and purchase request mechanization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our goal is to aid you in selecting the appropriate toolset and partner so you could expand and expedite your AP digital revamping.

But prior to beginning our product review, let’s do a quick review of what purchase order digitization is and how it creates greater capability for your AP operations.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

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

By means of digitization, purchase orders could be automatically forwarded to the relevant team to begin the approval procedure. Then, immediately after the order is authorized, it is automatically forwarded to the supplier.

Though this may not look like much at first glance, automating the purchasing operation eliminates the requirement for a manual process, paper-based systems, and simplifies the usual time-consuming workflow.

For instance, with purchase request solution or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, you can produce digital purchase requisitions that contractors can identify and then have the data mechanically integrated into your accounting tool.

This seemingly minuscule aptitude greatly simplifies the process, drastically reduces the need for human meddling, and thus, amplifies productivity inside your Accounts Payable section.

The Benefits of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We discussed various of the benefits of AP mechanization in the former portion, but just to make sure you understand, let's take these advantages apart in absolute terms.

• Digitized data entry and storage

• Enhanced productivity through more digitization and less human meddling

• Greater precision on account of less physical faults

• Increased perceptibility into procedures via digitized workflows

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

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

• Greater aptitude to oversee for safety and amenability

Now that we’ve discussed what AP and digital purchase order is, how it functions, and why it’s important, let’s begin our software assessment on Sharepoint as opposed to M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

Coming in this portion, we’re examining a fundamental evaluation between the rate and competencies of SharePoint and M-Files, succeeded by a deeper dive on their AP and purchase order mechanization potential.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

Though this portion presents a fine conventional simultaneous comparison, it doesn’t tell us much about how these tools administer workflows like purchase order automation. Thus in this succeeding section, we’re giving a synopsis of each tool and how it handles this important task.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

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

When it comes to purchase order mechanization, SharePoint enables you to handle the entirety of problems you may be confronting with your present-day, manual purchase requisition system.

Order Tracking

To initiate, by using Microsoft SharePoint and incorporating Office 365 tools, personnel could track purchase requisitions at any stage from request approvals to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also enable your company to tailor your digital purchase request system to your particular directions and needs.

Elements you may personalize within SharePoint include the format of the purchase requisition forms, role assignments, line items, multi-level approvals, and filters appertaining to payment terms, location, type, and more.

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 may also further correspondence across sectors. As soon as the PO operation has commenced, SharePoint can actuate a mechanized email to all respective parties to notify them that the process has started and once more when it’s carried out.

Interactive Dashboards

Another significant component of mechanization is the insight into productivity and workflow transparency. SharePoint provides this by permitting you to monitor purchase order progress through an interactive dashboard.

With the dashboard system, you can monitor purchase requisition history among departments, view the breakdown of approval vs denial proportion, and follow the state of ongoing POs.

Powerful Integrations

Furthermore, SharePoint offers superb adaptability in that it can work with with most programs between departments for greater cooperation.

Such as, if a department presents a purchase order for a network printer; once the request is handled, SharePoint can spontaneously develop an entry in your finance solution for the new IT asset.

Now that we’ve discussed what SharePoint is capable of in terms of aiding you in digitizing your AP workflows, let’s move on to M-Files.

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a vigorous enterprise content management (ECM) tool that provides both on-premise, cloud solutions, or a hybrid adaptation contingent on your business requirements.

Its interface is modeled off the Windows Explorer web engine making it simple to figure out and implement for parties that are used to the Windows operating system.

Furthermore, M-Files provides innovative functionality that allows companies to automate workflows and processes suchlike purchase order automation. Let’s study those aptitudes.

Input

With M-Files you can capture invoices from main or allocated locations and automate the ingestion of significant data associated with your purchase request and approval undertaking.

Data entry

As a continuation of the input competence, M-Files allows customers to identify and extract information from purchase requisition fields to facilitate the automation and transmission process. Furthermore, M-Files permits you to input any pertinent organizational rules, approval specifications and includes directory lookups to assist in ensuring veracity across the operation.

Matching and coding

As an advanced functional scope, M-Files may perform corresponding of POs and GL coding of non-PO statements in your ERP system to facilitate arrangement and routing.

Automated approvals

The M-Files system can control and digitize as much of the authorization procedure as you wish. This involves overseeing, queues, routing, response, and aging reports. Any purchase request that flunks the authorization course can be corrected physically and then restored into the mechanization flow for approval.

Automatic storage of approved POs

Once approval has been accepted, purchase orders can be transmitted to finance spontaneously to wrap up development and storage in a main cache.

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

Keeping your company competitive nowadays requires rationalizing your processes and uprooting the bottlenecks from your workflows that mitigate your proficiency and output. Moreover, it involves choosing the appropriate business solutions to complete your calculated growth goals.

At Wave, we can help by examining the foundational elements of your company and with gradual digital transformation and company system automation, revamp them.

We apply a consolidation of technology appertaining to your organizational needs to mechanize your laborious workflows around capturing, arranging, and cataloging data so that it's uncomplicated to find and use whenever, from any location.

We can be of assistance in individualizing your AP digitization tool to fit your company’s specific requirements and we gladly work with over 60 industry-accepted ECM and DMS tools including OpenText, M-Files, SharePoint, and Oracle.

If you’re ready to learn more, contact us today and we can arrange a time to chat.