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

Creating efficiencies in your business workflows is a crucial opening step toward digital conversion, back-office upgrading, and granting your organization an upper hand in a growingly cutthroat professional sector.

Paper-based systems and incoherent systems with impasses make collaboration, efficacy, perceptibility, and accountability to partners quite complex.

Through accounts payable mechanization, you could achieve dematerialized arrangements into your business and streamline duties like purchase orders, procurement, invoicing, payment processing, and data logging processes.

Mechanizing these forms of business workflows generates more capacity in enterprise resource planning (ERP), higher cost savings, and reformed utilization of your manpower.

Within this manual, we’re examining a couple of the most popular solutions designed for AP proficiency and purchase requisition automation: SharePoint and M-Files. Our objective is to assist you in selecting the appropriate solutions stack and partner so you could expand and speed up your AP digital revamping.

But prior to starting our product review, let’s talk through what purchase request digitization is and how it produces higher capability for your AP operations.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the notion of employing business software through artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotic technology to digitize the purchase requisition operation and its synonymous tasks.

Through digitization, purchase requisitions could be mechanically sent to the appropriate team to start the authorization routine. Then, immediately after the requisition is confirmed, it is automatically sent to the merchant.

While this may not appear to be significant at first glance, automating the buying operation abolishes the necessity for a by-hand process, paper-based systems, and expedites the usual time-consuming workflow.

For instance, with purchase requisition solution or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform, you can develop automated purchase requests that vendors can identify at which point the information automatically integrated into your accounting platform.

This presumably small ability greatly simplifies the process, remarkably reduces the demand for manual interference, and consequently, amplifies productivity inside your Accounts Payable department.

The Benefits of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We talked about several of the benefits of AP automation in the preceding portion, but to be certain that you understand, let's dissect these advantages in plain language.

• Mechanized data input and storage

• Improved competence through extra mechanization and less manual intervention

• Greater reliability on account of less human blunders

• Greater visibility into operations with your mechanized workflows

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

• Improved logistics process and merchant affinities and self-service portal

• Improved capability to regulate for safety and conformity

Now that we’ve reviewed what AP and electronic purchase order is, how it operates, and why it’s significant, let’s start our software evaluation on Sharepoint vs M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

Coming in this portion, we’re examining a basic analysis between the pricing and capabilities of SharePoint as well as M-Files, succeeded by an in-depth analysis on their AP and purchase order digitization capabilities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

While this chapter gives a good standard simultaneous analogy, it doesn’t educate us on how these programs handle workflows like electronic purchase order. So in this next portion, we’re providing a synopsis of each tool and how it manages this essential operation.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is amongst the most widely known and endorsed enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS solutions, because of its deep connection with different popular Microsoft solutions like Excel, Outlook, and Word.

In the context of purchase order mechanization, SharePoint enables you to resolve each one of the concerns you could be facing with your present-day, physical purchase requisition arrangement.

Order Tracking

To initiate, by utilizing Microsoft SharePoint and combining Office 365 tools, staff can monitor purchase requisitions at any phase from request approvals to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also allow your organization to adapt your digital purchase order system to your particular guidelines and requirements.

Aspects you can custom tailor within SharePoint involve the layout of the purchase request forms, line items, multi-level approvals, role assignments, and filters based on location, type, payment terms, and more.

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 may also promote connection between departments. Once the PO operation has commenced, SharePoint could actuate an automated email to all appropriate parties to alert them that the procedure has commenced and once more as soon as it’s carried out.

Interactive Dashboards

A further significant component of mechanization is the clarity into efficiency and workflow visibility. SharePoint provides this by allowing you to oversee purchase request progress with an interactive dashboard.

With the dashboard framework, you may oversee purchase requisition history throughout sections, distinguish the breakdown of approval vs denial percentage, and monitor the status of existing POs.

Vigorous Integrations

SharePoint also offers superb versatility in that it can work with with most tools across departments for greater collaboration.

For instance, if a department presents a purchase request for a network printer; when the request is handled, SharePoint can automatically produce an entry in your finance tool for the new IT asset.

Now that we’ve seen what SharePoint is capable of in terms of assisting you in automating your AP tasks, let’s proceed to M-Files.

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a vigorous enterprise content management (ECM) tool that offers both local, cloud solutions, or a hybrid variant determined by your business requirements.

Its interface is derived from the Windows Explorer web engine making it convenient to learn and execute for parties that are comfortable with the Windows operating system.

Furthermore, M-Files offers state-of-the-art functionality that allows companies to automate tasks and processes like purchase request automation. Let’s take a look at those aptitudes.

Input

With M-Files you could gather invoices from central or assigned areas and mechanize the collection of significant data associated with your purchase order and confirmation workflows.

Data entry

As an extension of the input capability, M-Files empowers customers to identify and withdraw details from purchase order domains to expedite the automation and routing process. Furthermore, M-Files enables you to input any appropriate business regulations, approval details and incorporates archive searches to assist in guaranteeing accuracy during the process.

Matching and coding

As a cutting-edge functionality, M-Files can carry out corresponding of POs and GL coding of non-PO statements in your ERP procedure to facilitate organization and transmission.

Automated approvals

The M-Files solution can control and mechanize as much of the authorization process as you desire. This includes handling, queues, routing, response, and aging records. Any purchase order that flunks the validation procedure can be amended physically and then reinstated into the automation flow for authorization.

Automatic storage of approved POs

Once validation has been accepted, purchase orders can be forwarded to finance spontaneously to conclude handling and storage in a primary database.

How Wave Can Aid You in Executing Your Purchase Order Automation Platform in Spokane

Keeping your business competitive today requires streamlining your procedures and removing the hindrances from your systems that work to diminish your capability and productivity. Additionally, it requires selecting the proper business tools to accomplish your strategic growth goals.

At Wave, we can assist by analyzing the foundational pieces of your business and with gradual digital transformation and organizational workflow automation, transform them.

We utilize a combination of technology based on your organizational necessities to mechanize your laborious workflows around gathering, regulating, and registering data so that it's simple to track down and utilize whenever, from any location.

We can assist you in customizing your AP digitization solution to satisfy your business's particular needs and we gladly work with over 60 industry-accepted ECM and DMS solutions including OpenText, M-Files, SharePoint, and Oracle.

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