SharePoint vs M-Files: The Tool For AP Proficiency & Purchase Order Automation in Durham

Creating competencies in your business workflows is a critical first stage toward digital transformation, back-office innovation, and supplying your company an advantage in an increasingly cutthroat professional industry.

Paper-based operations and disjointed workflows with bottlenecks make synergy, efficacy, visibility, and liability to shareholders notably complex.

Through accounts payable automation, you can achieve paperless operations into your organization and expedite tasks like purchase orders, procurement, invoicing, payment processing, and data logging tasks.

Automating these forms of business workflows creates more capacity in enterprise resource planning (ERP), higher cost savings, and improved utilization of your personnel.

In this guide, we’re reviewing a duo of the most famous platforms used for AP efficiency and purchase order mechanization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our target is to assist you in selecting the appropriate toolset and cooperate so you may expand and accelerate your AP digital revamping.

But prior to beginning our product review, let’s discuss what purchase request digitization is and how it generates greater productivity for your AP workflows.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the concept of employing business software through machine learning (ML), robotic technology, and artificial intelligence (AI) to automate the purchase requisition process and its related tasks.

By means of mechanization, purchase orders can be spontaneously sent to the appropriate party to start the validation routine. After, immediately after the order is authorized, it is automatically sent to the merchant.

Although this may not look like much at first glance, mechanizing the purchasing process abolishes the requirement for a by-hand process, paper-based arrangements, and simplifies the standard time-consuming workflow.

For instance, with purchase order solution or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, you can develop digital purchase orders that vendors can acknowledge at which point the data automatically incorporated into your accounting platform.

This superficially minor capability greatly expedites the workflow, drastically diminishes the requirement for manual meddling, and consequently, improves proficiency inside your Accounts Payable section.

The Perks of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We covered several of the benefits of AP automation in the preceding chapter, but to guarantee that you get the idea, let's break these benefits down in absolute terms.

• Automated data input and storage

• Enhanced competence via further digitization and less human meddling

• Greater reliability due to less manual faults

• Greater perceptibility into operations via digitized workflows

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

• Improved supply network and merchant relationships and self-service portal

• Improved capability to monitor for protection and conformity

Since we’ve gone over what AP and purchase order automation is, how it operates, and why it’s significant, let’s get into our platform evaluation on Sharepoint as opposed to M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

Within this section, we’re examining a fundamental breakdown between the rate and capabilities of SharePoint along with M-Files, followed by an in-depth analysis on their AP and purchase request automation capabilities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

Although this section gives a decent general neck-and-neck analogy, it doesn’t inform us on how these solutions handle workflows like digital purchase order. Thus in this next chapter, we’re going to do an overview of each program and how it manages this important undertaking.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is amongst the most widely known and established enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS platforms, due to its close relation to other prevalent Microsoft tools like Word, Excel, and Outlook.

When it comes to purchase requisition digitization, SharePoint sanctions you to resolve the entirety of issues you could be experiencing with your present-day, by-hand purchase order system.

Order Tracking

To begin, by utilizing Microsoft SharePoint and incorporating Office 365 tools, team members can track purchase requests at all stage from request authorizations to delivery.

Customization

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

Components you could personalize within SharePoint include the format of the purchase order forms, multi-level approvals, role assignments, line items, and filters appertaining to location, type, payment terms, and more.

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 could also facilitate communication between divisions. As soon as the PO procedure has begun, SharePoint could trigger an automated email to all respective teams to notify them that the procedure has started and again once it’s accomplished.

Interactive Dashboards

Another significant element of automation is the foresight into capability and workflow perceptibility. SharePoint enables this by authorizing you to supervise purchase requisition progress with an interactive dashboard.

With the dashboard system, you can monitor purchase request history throughout departments, view the evaluation of approval vs denial ratio, and track the state of existing POs.

Robust Integrations

Furthermore, SharePoint enables superb adaptability in that it can integrate with most solutions across departments for greater collaboration.

Such as, if a branch delivers a purchase order for a network printer; as soon as the order is actioned, SharePoint can spontaneously 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 assisting you in automating your AP tasks, let’s proceed to M-Files.

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a powerful enterprise content management (ECM) tool that presents both on-premise, cloud solutions, or a hybrid adaptation determined by your company requirements.

Its interface is based off of the Windows Explorer internet browser making it convenient to learn and perform for teams that are used to the Windows interface.

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

Input

With M-Files you can capture invoices from main or assigned locations and digitize the collection of essential data linked to your purchase order and approval undertaking.

Data entry

As an extension of the input competence, M-Files allows users to pinpoint and withdraw data from purchase requisition domains to promote the automation and routing process. Moreover, M-Files enables you to input any relevant business rules, confirmation specifications and incorporates database searches to assist in guaranteeing accuracy during the operation.

Matching and coding

As an advanced functional scope, M-Files may perform conforming of POs and GL coding of non-PO statements in your ERP procedure to facilitate organization and routing.

Digitized approvals

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

Automatic storage of approved POs

As soon as authorization has been accepted, purchase orders can be sent to finance spontaneously to finalize processing and storage in a primary database.

How Wave Can Aid You in Executing Your Purchase Order Automation Solution in Durham

Keeping your business fierce nowadays involves streamlining your processes and removing the impasses from your undertakings that decrease your capability and output. It also requires picking the proper business tools to complete your strategic growth aims.

At Wave, we can be of assistance by examining the fundamental aspects of your organization and through step-by-step digital switch-over and organizational process automation, revamp them.

We utilize a blended set of technology appertaining to your organizational needs to automate your laborious workflows around gathering, arranging, and filing data so that it's easy to locate and access whenever, from any location.

We can be of assistance in individualizing your AP mechanization tool to fit your business's precise needs and we happily collaborate with over 60 industry-recognized 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.