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

Creating capabilities in your organizational operations is a critical first step toward digital conversion, back-office upgrading, and supplying your business an upper hand in a growingly cutthroat professional industry.

Paper-based systems and disjointed workflows with bottlenecks make collaboration, productivity, perceptibility, and responsibility to stakeholders notably complex.

With accounts payable automation, you may achieve dematerialized arrangements into your business and simplify workflows like purchase orders, payment processing, procurement, invoicing, and data input workflows.

Digitizing these kinds of business workflows produces more efficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), higher cost savings, and improved application of your manpower.

Included in this handbook, we’re evaluating two of the most prevalent platforms designed for AP productivity and purchase requisition automation: SharePoint and M-Files. Our target is to help you select the right toolset and partner so you may augment and expedite your AP digital transformation.

But prior to starting our product analysis, let’s discuss what purchase order mechanization is and how it generates greater efficiency for your AP processes.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

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

Through digitization, purchase requisitions may be automatically transmitted to the fitting company to initiate the approval procedure. Later, immediately after the request is authorized, it is mechanically transmitted to the vendor.

While this may not look like much at first glance, digitizing the procurement procedure abolishes the need for a manual process, tangible schemes, and simplifies the often laborious workflow.

For instance, with purchase request software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, you can develop digital purchase requests that suppliers can identify followed by having the data automatically incorporated into your accounting tool.

This presumably minor aptitude greatly simplifies the system, drastically reduces the need for human intervention, and therefore, amplifies productivity within your Accounts Payable section.

The Advantages of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We talked about various of the benefits of AP mechanization in the former chapter, but just to make sure you get the point, let's dissect these advantages in absolute terms.

• Digitized data logging and storage

• Improved productivity through extra mechanization and less by-hand intervention

• Improved precision because of less human error

• Increased visibility into systems with your automated processes

• Real-time auditing, reporting, and analytics to uphold the development of performances

• Enhanced logistics network and supplier relationships and self-operated portal

• Enhanced capability to regulate for protection and conformity

So now that we’ve gone over what AP and digital purchase order is, how it functions, and why it’s vital, let’s get into our platform review on Sharepoint versus M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

In this chapter, we’re going to first take a look at a basic evaluation between the pricing and aptitudes of SharePoint as well as M-Files, and then an extensive review on their AP and purchase order automation qualities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

Although this chapter provides a fine standard simultaneous comparison, it doesn’t inform us on how these tools administer processes namely electronic purchase order. Thus in this next section, we’re giving an overview of each tool and how it administers this important undertaking.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is one of the most prominent and endorsed enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS tools, owing to its close relation to different prevalent Microsoft tools like Outlook, Word, and Excel.

In the context of purchase order digitization, SharePoint sanctions you to resolve all the concerns you could be facing with your current, physical purchase request system.

Order Tracking

To begin, by utilizing Microsoft SharePoint and integrating Office 365 applications, personnel may track purchase requests at every level from request authorizations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also enable your business to customize your digital purchase order scheme to your individual instructions and necessities.

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

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 can also facilitate communication between sectors. When the PO process has begun, SharePoint may prompt a programmed email to all relevant groups to inform them that the operation has commenced and once more as soon as it’s complete.

Interactive Dashboards

A further important aspect of digitization is the insight into capability and workflow transparency. SharePoint delivers this by authorizing you to monitor purchase order progress with an interactive dashboard.

Through the dashboard framework, you can oversee purchase requisition history among divisions, distinguish the evaluation of approval vs denial percentage, and monitor the state of POs in progress.

Vigorous Integrations

Moreover, SharePoint provides superb flexibility in that it can integrate with most programs across departments for greater collaboration.

For example, if a department submits a purchase request for a network printer; once the order is processed, SharePoint can automatically develop an entry in your finance tool for the new IT resource.

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

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a powerful enterprise content management (ECM) system that offers both local, cloud solutions, or a hybrid version determined by your organizational demands.

Its interface is based off of the Windows Explorer web engine making it convenient to understand and execute for parties that are comfortable with the Windows ecosystem.

Additionally, M-Files offers state-of-the-art functionality that allows businesses to automate tasks and processes such as purchase request automation. Let’s take a look at those competencies.

Input

With M-Files you may acquire invoices from central or distributed sites and mechanize the gathering of significant data related to your purchase request and approval processes.

Data entry

As a continuation of the input aptitude, M-Files allows customers to identify and pull out details from purchase requisition areas to facilitate the digitization and transmission process. Furthermore, M-Files allows you to input any relevant organizational regulations, confirmation specifications and contains database searches to assist in guaranteeing accuracy across the operation.

Matching and coding

As a cutting-edge feature-set, M-Files could execute matching of POs and GL coding of non-PO invoices in your ERP system to simplify structure and delivery.

Digitized approvals

The M-Files system can control and mechanize as much of the authorization workflow as you desire. This contains managing, queues, routing, response, and aging reports. Any purchase requisition that flunks the authorization procedure can be corrected by hand and then restored into the automation flow for authorization.

Automatic storage of approved POs

Once approval has been issued, purchase orders can be transmitted to finance spontaneously to conclude processing and storage in a primary cache.

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

Holding your company fierce today involves streamlining your processes and removing the impasses from your systems that work to diminish your capability and efficacy. Additionally, it involves choosing the appropriate business solutions to achieve your strategic growth aims.

At Wave, we can be of assistance by studying the essential elements of your organization and via incremental digital switch-over and business workflow automation, transform them.

We use a consolidation of innovations in accordance with your organizational requirements to mechanize your laborious tasks around collecting, organizing, and registering data so that it's uncomplicated to track down and access at any time, from anywhere.

We can assist you in customizing your AP mechanization tool to fulfill your company’s specific demands and we happily collaborate with upwards of 60 industry-recognized ECM and DMS solutions including M-Files, SharePoint, OpenText, and Oracle.

If you’d like to discover more, reach out today and we can set up a time to chat.