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

Creating competencies in your business processes is a crucial initial step toward digital conversion, back-office upgrading, and giving your business an upper hand in an increasingly aggressive professional landscape.

Tangible operations and disjointed workflows with logjams make collaboration, productivity, visibility, and responsibility to stakeholders notably complex.

With accounts payable digitization, you can carry out paperless arrangements into your company and streamline duties like purchase requests, invoicing, payment processing, procurement, and data input tasks.

Mechanizing these forms of company processes produces more efficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), greater cost reductions, and reformed utilization of your personnel.

In this guide, we’re examining two of the most famous platforms used for AP productivity and purchase order digitization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our objective is to assist you in selecting the appropriate tech stack and partner so you could develop and speed up your AP digital revamping.

But prior to beginning our product assessment, let’s do a quick review of what purchase order mechanization is and how it creates further productivity for your AP processes.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

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

By means of automation, purchase orders may be spontaneously transmitted to the relevant team to initiate the approval procedure. After, as soon as the request is approved, it is automatically sent to the merchant.

Although this may not seem like much at first read, mechanizing the procurement operation removes the necessity for a by-hand process, paper-based schemes, and streamlines the usual labor-intensive workflow.

For example, with purchase order software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform, you can develop automated purchase requests that vendors can acknowledge at which point the data mechanically incorporated into your accounting software.

This presumably minuscule ability greatly expedites the workflow, remarkably reduces the requirement for human intervention, and thus, amplifies proficiency within your Accounts Payable section.

The Advantages of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We talked about several of the advantages of AP automation in the previous section, but to guarantee that you get the point, let's take these advantages apart in plain language.

• Automated data entry and storage

• Enhanced efficiency with extra automation and less manual meddling

• Enhanced accuracy on account of less physical error

• Increased perceptibility into operations with your mechanized processes

• Actual-time reporting, analytics, and auditing to continue to improve performances

• Reformed supply chain and merchant connections and self-managed portal

• Greater capability to oversee for protection and compliance

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

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

In this section, we’re examining a straightforward breakdown between the pricing and aptitudes of SharePoint and M-Files, followed by an in-depth analysis on their AP and purchase order automation capabilities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

Although this chapter presents a decent standard simultaneous comparison, it doesn’t tell us much about how these solutions handle workflows like purchase order automation. Therefore in this succeeding portion, we’re giving a synopsis of each tool and how it handles this essential operation.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is one of the most widely known and endorsed enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS platforms, owing to its deep connection with other popular Microsoft tools like Word, Excel, and Outlook.

In the context of purchase requisition automation, SharePoint enables you to handle each one of the issues you could be facing with your existing, physical purchase order system.

Order Tracking

To initiate, by utilizing Microsoft SharePoint and combining Office 365 programs, team members can oversee purchase requests at any level from request confirmations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also enable your business to adapt your electronic purchase requisition system to your specific guidelines and needs.

Aspects you can personalize within SharePoint comprise of the template of the purchase order forms, role assignments, line items, multi-level approvals, and filters attributed to payment terms, location, type, and more.

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 could also facilitate connection among departments. As soon as the PO operation has started, SharePoint can prompt a mechanized email to all relevant parties to notify them that the procedure has begun and again once it’s accomplished.

Interactive Dashboards

A further important component of digitization is the foresight into productivity and workflow visibility. SharePoint delivers this by permitting you to oversee purchase order progress through an interactive dashboard.

Via the dashboard framework, you may oversee purchase requisition history among departments, distinguish the breakdown of approval vs denial ratio, and monitor the position of existing POs.

Robust Integrations

Furthermore, SharePoint offers terrific adaptability in that it can incorporate with most programs among departments for improved synergy.

For instance, if a branch presents a purchase requisition for a network printer; as soon as the order is processed, SharePoint can automatically develop an entry in your finance solution for the new IT asset.

Now that we’ve seen what SharePoint is capable of 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) solution that offers both local, cloud solutions, or a hybrid variant determined by your organizational needs.

Its interface is based off of the Windows Explorer web engine making it simple to figure out and perform for teams that are accustomed to the Windows interface.

Moreover, M-Files grants state-of-the-art functionality that enables companies to mechanize tasks and processes suchlike purchase request automation. Let’s examine those aptitudes.

Input

With M-Files you may acquire invoices from main or distributed sites and digitize the gathering of essential data linked to your purchase order and confirmation undertaking.

Data entry

As a continuation of the input aptitude, M-Files empowers users to pinpoint and withdraw information from purchase request domains to facilitate the automation and conveying process. Furthermore, M-Files enables you to input any relevant organizational codes, confirmation details and incorporates database lookups to assist in guaranteeing veracity throughout the process.

Matching and coding

As a state-of-the-art functional scope, M-Files may execute matching of POs and GL coding of non-PO statements in your ERP procedure to simplify organization and transmission.

Digitized approvals

The M-Files solution can regulate and digitize as much of the authorization workflow as you wish. This includes overseeing, routing, response, queues, and aging reports. Any purchase requisition that fails the validation procedure can be amended by hand and then put back into the automation flow for authorization.

Automatic storage of approved POs

After authorization has been accepted, purchase orders can be transmitted to finance mechanically to conclude handling and storage in a central repository.

How Wave Can Help You Implement Your Purchase Order Automation Platform in Greensboro

Holding your business fierce today requires rationalizing your procedures and uprooting the impasses from your systems that work to diminish your capability and efficacy. Additionally, it requires picking the right business tools to accomplish your calculated growth goals.

At Wave, we can assist by examining the fundamental elements of your business and via step-by-step digital conversion and business workflow automation, transform them.

We apply a combination of technology appertaining to your business requirements to automate your tedious tasks around capturing, regulating, and registering data so that it's uncomplicated to track down and use whenever, from any location.

We can be of assistance in individualizing your AP mechanization solution to fulfill your business's particular needs and we happily work with over 60 industry-recognized ECM and DMS solutions including SharePoint, OpenText, M-Files, and Oracle.

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