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

Developing efficiencies in your company workflows is a critical first stage toward digital conversion, back-office modernization, and giving your business an upper hand in a progressively aggressive professional sector.

Concrete systems and disjointed workflows with logjams make cooperation, efficiency, perceptibility, and liability to shareholders notably difficult.

Through accounts payable automation, you could carry out paperless operations into your business and simplify workflows like purchase requests, procurement, invoicing, payment processing, and data entry processes.

Digitizing these kinds of business workflows produces more capacity in enterprise resource planning (ERP), better cost reductions, and enhanced application of your human resources.

In this handbook, we’re examining a duo of the most prevalent solutions geared toward AP proficiency and purchase requisition mechanization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our target is to help you select the right tech stack and collaborate so you may augment and accelerate your AP digital transformation.

But before we begin with our product analysis, let’s talk through what purchase requisition automation 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 solutions with robotic technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to mechanize the purchase order operation and its corresponding workflows.

By means of automation, purchase requisitions can be mechanically sent to the appropriate team to begin the approval process. Then, once the requisition is confirmed, it is automatically transmitted to the vendor.

While this may not appear to be significant at first glance, automating the buying operation eliminates the requirement for a physical process, materialized systems, and expedites the usual time-consuming workflow.

As an example, with purchase order solution or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform, you can produce digital purchase requisitions that vendors can comprehend at which point the information automatically integrated into your accounting tool.

This superficially minuscule ability significantly expedites the workflow, dramatically reduces the need for manual intervention, and therefore, improves efficiency through your Accounts Payable department.

The Advantages of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We discussed a number of the gains of AP digitization in the preceding section, but just to make sure you get the point, let's dissect these advantages in the simplest terms.

• Automated data entry and storage

• Improved efficiency via further automation and less manual meddling

• Improved reliability because of less physical error

• Increased visibility into systems through your automated processes

• Real-time auditing, reporting, and analytics to continue to improve efficiencies

• Improved supply chain and supplier affinities and self-service portal

• Improved ability to oversee for protection and amenability

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

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

In this chapter, we’re examining a fundamental breakdown between the costing and competencies of SharePoint along with M-Files, and then an extensive review on their AP and purchase order mechanization capabilities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

Though this section provides a good conventional neck-and-neck comparison, it doesn’t inform us on how these programs administer processes like purchase order automation. Therefore in this succeeding section, we’re going to do a synopsis of each tool and how it handles this essential operation.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is amongst the most recognized and established enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS tools, because of its strong association with other famed Microsoft solutions like Excel, Outlook, and Word.

When it comes to purchase requisition digitization, SharePoint allows you to handle each one of the problems you may be confronting with your current, physical purchase request arrangement.

Order Tracking

To start, by using Microsoft SharePoint and combining Office 365 tools, team members could oversee purchase requests at all phase from request confirmations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also allow your organization to tailor your digital purchase order arrangement to your particular directions and requirements.

Elements you could personalize within SharePoint involve the template of the purchase request forms, role assignments, line items, multi-level approvals, and filters attributed to type, payment terms, location, and more.

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 can also promote communication across sectors. As soon as the PO procedure has begun, SharePoint may prompt an automated email to all relevant teams to notify them that the operation has started and once more as soon as it’s carried out.

Interactive Dashboards

A further important component of digitization is the insight into productivity and workflow perceptibility. SharePoint delivers this by permitting you to supervise purchase requisition progress with an interactive dashboard.

Via the dashboard setup, you may track purchase request history across departments, distinguish the evaluation of approval vs denial ratio, and track the position of POs in progress.

Vigorous Integrations

SharePoint also provides superb adaptability in that it can work with with most tools across departments for increased cooperation.

Such as, if a division presents a purchase requisition for a network printer; when the order is actioned, SharePoint can automatically generate an entry in your finance tool for the new IT resource.

Now that we’ve seen what SharePoint can accomplish in terms of assisting you in automating your AP tasks, let’s move on to M-Files.

M-Files Overview

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

Its interface is derived from the Windows Explorer web engine making it convenient to figure out and implement for teams that are comfortable with the Windows ecosystem.

Furthermore, M-Files grants advanced functionality that allows businesses to automate workflows and processes suchlike purchase requisition automation. Let’s examine those capabilities.

Input

With M-Files you may capture invoices from central or assigned locations and mechanize the collection of essential data associated with your purchase request and confirmation workflows.

Data entry

As an extension of the input capability, M-Files empowers clients to distinguish and withdraw data from purchase requisition fields to facilitate the mechanization and transmission process. Moreover, M-Files allows you to input any relevant company regulations, confirmation specifications and contains database searches to help ensure precision throughout the procedure.

Matching and coding

As an advanced functionality, M-Files can carry out matching of POs and GL coding of non-PO invoices in your ERP operation to facilitate structure and routing.

Digitized approvals

The M-Files system can control and digitize as much of the confirmation process as you wish. This contains handling, response, queues, routing, and aging accounts. Any purchase requisition that falls short of the authorization course can be corrected by hand and then put back into the mechanization flow for approval.

Automatic storage of approved POs

As soon as authorization has been accepted, purchase orders can be forwarded to finance mechanically to conclude development and storage in a central cache.

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

Holding your business cutthroat today means rationalizing your procedures and eliminating the bottlenecks from your workflows that decrease your efficiency and productivity. Additionally, it requires picking the right business tools to complete your tactical growth objectives.

At Wave, we can assist by studying the essential pieces of your company and through gradual digital conversion and business process automation, reform them.

We apply a blended set of solutions based on your company needs to automate your tedious workflows around collecting, arranging, and registering data so that it's easy to find and utilize at any time, from anywhere.

We can be of assistance in individualizing your AP digitization software to satisfy your organization’s precise requirements and we happily go along with more than 60 industry-acknowledged ECM and DMS platforms including OpenText, M-Files, SharePoint, and Oracle.

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