SharePoint vs M-Files: The Solution For AP Proficiency & Purchase Order Automation in Philadelphia

Creating capabilities in your business operations is a crucial opening step toward digital switch-over, back-office upgrading, and giving your company an advantage in an increasingly competitive professional industry.

Tangible systems and disjointed workflows with bottlenecks make collaboration, productivity, transparency, and accountability to shareholders quite complex.

Through accounts payable digitization, you may carry out paperless arrangements into your organization and simplify duties like purchase requisitions, payment processing, procurement, invoicing, and data input processes.

Automating these kinds of organizational processes creates more proficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), better expenditure cuts, and reformed application of your human resources.

Included in this handbook, we’re reviewing a duo of the most prevalent solutions used for AP proficiency and purchase order automation: SharePoint and M-Files. Our target is to assist you in selecting the proper toolset and partner so you may augment and accelerate your AP digital transformation.

But prior to beginning our product assessment, let’s do a quick review of what purchase requisition automation is and how it creates greater productivity for your AP processes.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the concept of using business software with artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotic technology to digitize the purchase order process and its synonymous workflows.

By means of digitization, purchase requests could be mechanically transmitted to the relevant team to begin the authorization process. Later, as soon as the requisition is confirmed, it is automatically sent to the merchant.

Although this may not seem like much at first read, automating the purchasing operation eliminates the need for a manual process, paper-based schemes, and expedites the usual labor-intensive workflow.

As an example, with purchase order software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform, you can create electronic purchase requisitions that suppliers can identify and then have the details mechanically integrated into your accounting tool.

This superficially small aptitude substantially expedites the process, drastically lessens the demand for human intervention, and thus, improves efficiency within your Accounts Payable section.

The Perks of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We discussed several of the benefits of AP mechanization in the previous portion, but to be certain that you get the idea, let's dissect these advantages in the simplest terms.

• Digitized data entry and storage

• Improved productivity through further automation and less by-hand interference

• Improved accuracy on account of less manual blunders

• Greater transparency into systems via digitized processes

• Actual-time analytics, auditing, and reporting to sustain the betterment of efficiencies

• Reformed logistics network and supplier connections and self-service portal

• Greater aptitude to oversee for security and amenability

Now that we’ve gone over what AP and purchase order automation is, how it operates, and why it’s vital, let’s get into our software assessment on Sharepoint as opposed to M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

In this section, we’re examining a fundamental breakdown between the costing and aptitudes of SharePoint and M-Files, and then an extensive review on their AP and purchase request mechanization qualities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

While this chapter gives a decent conventional simultaneous analogy, it doesn’t inform us on how these solutions handle tasks like purchase order automation. Therefore in this succeeding chapter, we’re providing a synopsis of each tool and how it handles this important task.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is one of the most recognized and established enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS platforms, due to its strong association with different popular Microsoft programs like Word, Excel, and Outlook.

When it comes to purchase requisition mechanization, SharePoint allows you to address each one of the problems you could be confronting with your present-day, by-hand purchase requisition arrangement.

Order Tracking

To start, by utilizing Microsoft SharePoint and incorporating Office 365 tools, staff could monitor purchase orders at all level from request authorizations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also allow your business to tailor your automated purchase requisition arrangement to your individual instructions and needs.

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

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 could also promote connection across sectors. Once the PO process has commenced, SharePoint may actuate a mechanized email to all relevant teams to alert them that the procedure has begun and again once it’s carried out.

Interactive Dashboards

Another significant aspect of mechanization is the insight into capability and workflow visibility. SharePoint delivers this by permitting you to supervise purchase request progress via an interactive dashboard.

Via the dashboard system, you can monitor purchase requisition history across sections, see the breakdown of approval vs denial percentage, and track the state of POs in progress.

Robust Integrations

Furthermore, SharePoint offers great versatility in that it can incorporate with most programs between departments for greater cooperation.

For instance, if a department presents a purchase request for a network printer; as soon as the requisition is handled, SharePoint can automatically generate an entry in your finance solution for the new IT resource.

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

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a vigorous enterprise content management (ECM) solution that presents both local, cloud solutions, or a hybrid adaptation contingent on your business demands.

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

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

Input

With M-Files you may capture invoices from main or assigned sites and mechanize the gathering of significant data linked to your purchase order and confirmation workflows.

Data entry

As an extension of the input competence, M-Files enables customers to identify and withdraw data from purchase order fields to expedite the automation and routing process. Furthermore, M-Files enables you to input any appropriate organizational codes, validation terms and includes directory lookups to assist in guaranteeing veracity throughout the procedure.

Matching and coding

As an advanced feature-set, M-Files could carry out conforming of POs and GL coding of non-PO billing statements in your ERP procedure to simplify structure and transmission.

Mechanized approvals

The M-Files platform can manage and automate as much of the approval procedure as you desire. This includes handling, response, queues, routing, and aging accounts. Any purchase request that flunks the authorization course can be amended manually and then put back into the digitization flow for authorization.

Automatic storage of approved POs

As soon as approval has been granted, purchase requests can be transmitted to finance automatically to finalize processing and storage in a central repository.

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

Holding your company cutthroat nowadays means streamlining your operations and removing the hindrances from your systems that decrease your proficiency and efficacy. It also requires choosing the appropriate business systems to achieve your calculated growth objectives.

At Wave, we can assist by analyzing the essential aspects of your organization and through step-by-step digital transformation and company system automation, transform them.

We utilize a consolidation of solutions based on your business needs to digitize your repetitive tasks around collecting, arranging, and registering data so that it's uncomplicated to locate and use whenever, from wherever.

We can be of assistance in individualizing your AP automation tool to fulfill your company’s particular requirements and we happily work with more than 60 industry-acknowledged ECM and DMS tools including M-Files, SharePoint, OpenText, and Oracle.

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