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

Generating capabilities in your business workflows is a critical opening stage toward digital transformation, back-office modernization, and supplying your company an edge in an increasingly aggressive professional sector.

Concrete arrangements and fragmented systems with logjams make collaboration, efficiency, transparency, and accountability to partners very complicated.

With accounts payable automation, you may achieve dematerialized arrangements into your organization and simplify tasks like purchase requisitions, payment processing, procurement, invoicing, and data entry workflows.

Digitizing these types of company processes creates more proficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), better cost reductions, and enhanced employment of your human resources.

Included in this guide, we’re examining a couple of the most popular solutions designed for AP productivity and purchase requisition digitization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our goal is to aid you in selecting the proper tech stack and partner so you can expand and expedite your AP digital revamping.

But prior to starting our product review, let’s discuss what purchase requisition digitization is and how it creates greater capability for your AP operations.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

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

Through mechanization, purchase orders may be automatically sent to the relevant party to begin the authorization procedure. Later, once the order is confirmed, it is mechanically transmitted to the merchant.

Though this may not appear to be significant at first glance, digitizing the purchasing operation removes the necessity for a physical process, materialized schemes, and simplifies the often labor-intensive workflow.

For example, with purchase order software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool, you can create electronic purchase orders that suppliers can identify and then have the data spontaneously fused into your accounting platform.

This superficially small aptitude substantially expedites the process, dramatically reduces the requirement for manual meddling, and therefore, amplifies productivity within your Accounts Payable division.

The Perks of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We covered several of the advantages of AP mechanization in the former section, but to be certain that you understand, let's take these advantages apart in absolute terms.

• Digitized data logging and storage

• Improved productivity via more digitization and less human intervention

• Improved reliability because of less physical error

• Enhanced transparency into procedures through your automated tasks

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

• Reformed distribution chain and vendor relationships and self-service portal

• Improved aptitude to regulate for protection and amenability

So now that we’ve reviewed what AP and purchase order automation is, how it works, and why it’s significant, let’s get into our product assessment on Sharepoint vs M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

Within this chapter, we’re going to first take a look at a straightforward evaluation between the rate and competencies of SharePoint and M-Files, succeeded by an in-depth analysis on their AP and purchase order digitization capabilities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

Though this section gives a fine general simultaneous analogy, it doesn’t tell us much about how these tools manage processes such as electronic purchase order. So in this following chapter, we’re providing a summary of each program and how it administers this significant undertaking.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is amongst the most widely known and established enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS solutions, because of its close relation to different popular Microsoft solutions like Outlook, Word, and Excel.

When it comes to purchase requisition mechanization, SharePoint allows you to address all the issues you could be facing with your existing, physical purchase request arrangement.

Order Tracking

To begin, by using Microsoft SharePoint and combining Office 365 applications, team members may oversee purchase requests at every stage from request approvals to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also empower your organization to customize your electronic purchase requisition system to your individual instructions and requirements.

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

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 may also facilitate connection among departments. As soon as the PO procedure has begun, SharePoint could prompt an automated email to all respective teams to notify them that the operation has begun and once more as soon as it’s complete.

Interactive Dashboards

One more critical aspect of mechanization is the clarity into efficiency and workflow visibility. SharePoint enables this by allowing you to oversee purchase order progress through an interactive dashboard.

Via the dashboard system, you could track purchase order history across divisions, see the analysis of approval vs denial percentage, and track the state of POs in progress.

Powerful Integrations

SharePoint also enables great flexibility in that it can incorporate with most tools between departments for increased collaboration.

For instance, if a department submits a purchase order for a network printer; when the order is actioned, SharePoint can automatically develop an entry in your finance solution for the new IT resource.

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

M-Files Overview

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

Its interface is derived from the Windows Explorer web engine making it simple to understand and perform for departments that are used to the Windows operating system.

Additionally, M-Files grants state-of-the-art functionality that empowers organizations to automate operations and processes like purchase request automation. Let’s study those capabilities.

Input

With M-Files you can capture invoices from main or distributed sites and mechanize the gathering of important data linked to your purchase requisition and confirmation processes.

Data entry

As an extension of the input competence, M-Files enables customers to distinguish and extract information from purchase requisition areas to promote the digitization and routing process. Additionally, M-Files allows you to input any relevant company rules, approval terms and contains directory searches to assist in ensuring veracity throughout the operation.

Matching and coding

As a cutting-edge functional scope, M-Files could perform matching of POs and GL coding of non-PO invoices in your ERP system to streamline structure and delivery.

Automated approvals

The M-Files solution can manage and mechanize as much of the authorization procedure as you desire. This includes handling, response, queues, routing, and aging reports. Any purchase order that fails the approval course can be amended manually and then restored into the digitization flow for approval.

Automatic storage of approved POs

As soon as validation has been accepted, purchase requests can be transmitted to finance automatically to wrap up development and storage in a primary cache.

How Wave Can Help You Implement Your Purchase Order Automation Solution in San Francisco

Keeping your organization competitive nowadays means simplifying your procedures and removing the hindrances from your undertakings that mitigate your capability and output. It also means choosing the proper business tools to complete your calculated growth objectives.

At Wave, we can be of assistance by studying the fundamental aspects of your company and with step-by-step digital switch-over and company workflow automation, revamp them.

We use a consolidation of innovations appertaining to your organizational needs to mechanize your repetitive processes around gathering, arranging, and registering data so that it's uncomplicated to find and access at any time, from anywhere.

We can be of assistance in individualizing your AP digitization software to satisfy your business's precise requirements and we gladly work with upwards of 60 industry-accepted ECM and DMS tools including SharePoint, OpenText, M-Files, and Oracle.

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