SharePoint vs M-Files: The Solution For AP Efficiency & Purchase Order Automation in Orlando
Generating competencies in your organizational workflows is a critical initial stage toward digital switch-over, back-office upgrading, and granting your organization an edge in a growingly cutthroat professional landscape.
Paper-based arrangements and incoherent workflows with bottlenecks make collaboration, efficiency, perceptibility, and accountability to shareholders quite complicated.
By means of accounts payable automation, you may carry out dematerialized arrangements into your company and expedite workflows like purchase requests, invoicing, payment processing, procurement, and data entry processes.
Mechanizing these forms of business processes creates more capacity in enterprise resource planning (ERP), better expenditure cuts, and reformed employment of your personnel.
Within this handbook, we’re reviewing a duo of the most famous tools used for AP proficiency and purchase request digitization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our goal is to aid you in selecting the appropriate tech stack and cooperate so you can augment and speed up your AP digital revamping.
But prior to starting our product assessment, let’s talk through what purchase order mechanization is and how it produces greater capability for your AP processes.
What is Purchase Order Automation?
Purchase order automation is the notion of using business tools with artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotic technology to automate the purchase requisition process and its synonymous undertakings.
Through digitization, purchase requisitions may be spontaneously transmitted to the relevant party to start the validation procedure. After, once the request is approved, it is instinctively sent to the supplier.
Though this may not look like much at first glance, digitizing the purchasing operation abolishes the requirement for a manual process, materialized systems, and expedites the usual laborious workflow.
For example, with purchase order solution or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool, you can develop digital purchase requisitions that suppliers can identify at which point the data spontaneously integrated into your accounting software.
This presumably minor capability substantially simplifies the process, remarkably lessens the need for manual interference, and therefore, enhances proficiency inside your Accounts Payable section.
The Advantages of AP and Purchase Order Automation
We discussed various of the advantages of AP mechanization in the previous chapter, but just to make sure you understand, let's take these advantages apart in absolute terms.
Digitized data input and storage
Greater efficiency through more automation and less by-hand meddling
Greater accuracy due to less physical error
Greater perceptibility into systems via digitized workflows
Actual-time reporting, analytics, and auditing to continue to improve performances
Reformed supply network and vendor connections and self-service portal
Improved ability to oversee for protection and amenability
Now that we’ve discussed what AP and digital purchase order is, how it functions, and why it’s vital, let’s get into our software evaluation on Sharepoint vs M-Files.
Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review
In this portion, we’re reviewing a straightforward evaluation between the rate and aptitudes of SharePoint as well as M-Files, and then an in-depth analysis on their AP and purchase requisition digitization capabilities.
Basic Price and Features Breakdown
Although this section gives a decent standard neck-and-neck evaluation, it doesn’t tell us much about how these programs manage workflows like purchase order automation. Therefore in this succeeding chapter, we’re giving an overview of each tool and how it administers this significant task.
Microsoft SharePoint Overview
SharePoint is one of the more prominent and established enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS solutions, because of its strong association with other popular Microsoft solutions like Word, Excel, and Outlook.
When it comes to purchase order digitization, SharePoint allows you to handle the entirety of problems you may be confronting with your present-day, manual purchase requisition system.
Order Tracking
To initiate, by employing Microsoft SharePoint and integrating Office 365 programs, team members could track purchase orders at all stage from request approvals to delivery.
Customization
SharePoint and Office 365 also empower your organization to tailor your digital purchase order arrangement to your specific guidelines and requirements.
Aspects you can individualize within SharePoint include the layout of the purchase requisition forms, multi-level approvals, role assignments, line items, and filters appertaining to location, type, payment terms, and more.
Communication
SharePoint and Office 365 may also further correspondence between departments. Once the PO procedure has commenced, SharePoint could trigger an automated email to all relevant parties to alert them that the operation has commenced and once more when it’s complete.
Interactive Dashboards
Another critical element of automation is the clarity into capability and workflow transparency. SharePoint provides this by permitting you to monitor purchase order progress through an interactive dashboard.
Via the dashboard framework, you can monitor purchase order history among divisions, see the evaluation of approval vs denial percentage, and follow the state of ongoing POs.
Powerful Integrations
Moreover, SharePoint offers terrific adaptability in that it can integrate with most tools among departments for improved synergy.
For instance, if a division submits a purchase order for a network printer; when the requisition is actioned, SharePoint can mechanically generate an entry in your finance solution for the new IT asset.
Now that we’ve learned about what SharePoint can accomplish in terms of aiding you in digitizing your AP processes, let’s proceed to M-Files.
M-Files Overview
M-Files is a powerful enterprise content management (ECM) system that provides both on-site, cloud solutions, or a hybrid version contingent on your organizational demands.
Its interface is modeled off the Windows Explorer web engine making it convenient to understand and perform for departments that are comfortable with the Windows operating system.
Moreover, M-Files grants advanced functionality that enables businesses to automate operations and processes like purchase order automation. Let’s study those aptitudes.
Input
With M-Files you can gather invoices from main or distributed locations and automate the ingestion of essential data associated with your purchase requisition and authorization workflows.
Data entry
As an extension of the input capability, M-Files allows customers to identify and withdraw details from purchase requisition domains to promote the automation and transmission process. Additionally, M-Files enables you to input any appropriate business rules, approval specifications and contains database lookups to assist in ensuring precision throughout the process.
Matching and coding
As a cutting-edge feature-set, M-Files could execute matching of POs and GL coding of non-PO billing statements in your ERP system to simplify organization and delivery.
Mechanized approvals
The M-Files solution can regulate and digitize as much of the approval workflow as you wish. This involves managing, routing, response, queues, and aging accounts. Any purchase order that falls short of the authorization process can be corrected manually and then put back into the digitization flow for approval.
Automatic storage of approved POs
Once validation has been issued, purchase requests can be forwarded to finance automatically to conclude handling and storage in a main database.
How Wave Can Help You Implement Your Purchase Order Automation Tool in Orlando
Keeping your organization cutthroat today involves streamlining your operations and removing the hindrances from your undertakings that decrease your capability and output. It also involves choosing the right business solutions to achieve your tactical growth aims.
At Wave, we can help by analyzing the essential pieces of your business and through incremental digital switch-over and business workflow automation, revamp them.
We utilize a combination of solutions appertaining to your organizational needs to mechanize your laborious workflows around collecting, arranging, and filing data so that it's simple to locate and use whenever, from wherever.
We can assist you in customizing your AP automation software to fit your organization’s precise needs and we happily work with upwards of 60 industry-acknowledged ECM and DMS tools including M-Files, SharePoint, OpenText, and Oracle.
If you’d like to discover more, contact us today and we can set up a time to chat.