SharePoint vs M-Files: The Platform For AP Proficiency & Purchase Order Automation in North Las Vegas

Creating competencies in your business processes is a critical initial stage toward digital switch-over, back-office modernization, and supplying your company an upper hand in an increasingly cutthroat professional landscape.

Tangible operations and disjointed workflows with logjams make collaboration, productivity, perceptibility, and accountability to stakeholders very complex.

Through accounts payable mechanization, you can achieve paperless operations into your organization and simplify workflows like purchase requisitions, invoicing, payment processing, procurement, and data entry tasks.

Digitizing these forms of business processes generates more efficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), greater expenditure cuts, and improved utilization of your human resources.

Within this guide, we’re reviewing two of the most popular tools used for AP efficiency and purchase request mechanization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our objective is to help you select the appropriate solutions stack and collaborate so you may develop and accelerate your AP digital switch-over.

But prior to starting our product review, let’s discuss what purchase requisition mechanization is and how it produces further efficiency for your AP workflows.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the process of employing business solutions through artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotic technology to digitize the purchase requisition system and its corresponding undertakings.

Via automation, purchase requests may be spontaneously forwarded to the relevant company to start the approval routine. Later, once the order is confirmed, it is mechanically transmitted to the vendor.

Although this may not appear to be significant at first glance, automating the purchasing operation removes the requirement for a by-hand process, tangible schemes, and streamlines the usual laborious workflow.

For instance, with purchase requisition solution or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, you can develop automated purchase orders that suppliers can acknowledge and then have the information automatically incorporated into your accounting tool.

This presumably minor ability greatly streamlines the system, remarkably lessens the requirement for by-hand intervention, and consequently, amplifies productivity within your Accounts Payable division.

The Perks of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We talked about several of the gains of AP mechanization in the former chapter, but to guarantee that you get the point, let's dissect these advantages in plain language.

• Automated data input and storage

• Enhanced efficiency with more mechanization and less by-hand meddling

• Enhanced reliability on account of less physical blunders

• Enhanced visibility into systems with your automated tasks

• Real-time auditing, reporting, and analytics to sustain the betterment of capacities

• Reformed distribution process and vendor relationships and self-managed portal

• Enhanced capability to oversee for protection and conformity

Now that we’ve reviewed what AP and digital purchase order is, how it works, and why it’s significant, let’s begin our software review on Sharepoint as opposed to M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

Coming in this portion, we’re going to first take a look at a fundamental evaluation between the costing and competencies of SharePoint as well as M-Files, followed by a deeper dive on their AP and purchase requisition automation potential.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

Although this chapter provides a decent conventional simultaneous comparison, it doesn’t inform us on how these tools manage tasks such as purchase order automation. Thus in this next chapter, we’re providing a synopsis of each solution and how it administers this essential undertaking.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

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

In the context of purchase request automation, SharePoint enables you to resolve each one of the issues you may be experiencing with your existing, manual purchase request arrangement.

Order Tracking

To start, by utilizing Microsoft SharePoint and integrating Office 365 programs, personnel could oversee purchase requests at every phase from request authorizations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also empower your organization to adapt your digital purchase request arrangement to your particular instructions and needs.

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

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 can also promote connection between divisions. As soon as the PO procedure has started, SharePoint could trigger an automated email to all appropriate parties to inform them that the process has started and again once it’s complete.

Interactive Dashboards

One more critical element of automation is the clarity into capability and workflow visibility. SharePoint delivers this by permitting you to oversee purchase order progress via an interactive dashboard.

Through the dashboard setup, you can oversee purchase request history among sections, distinguish the breakdown of approval vs denial proportion, and track the position of ongoing POs.

Powerful Integrations

Moreover, SharePoint provides terrific adaptability in that it can work with with most programs across departments for increased synergy.

For example, if a division delivers a purchase requisition for a network printer; once the request is handled, SharePoint can spontaneously generate an entry in your finance solution for the new IT asset.

Now that we’ve learned about 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 powerful enterprise content management (ECM) solution that presents both on-site, cloud solutions, or a hybrid variant depending on your business needs.

Its interface is modeled off the Windows Explorer internet browser making it simple to figure out and execute for parties that are accustomed to the Windows operating system.

Moreover, M-Files grants state-of-the-art functionality that allows businesses to automate workflows and processes suchlike purchase requisition automation. Let’s study those aptitudes.

Input

With M-Files you can acquire invoices from central or assigned areas and mechanize the ingestion of important data associated with your purchase order and confirmation processes.

Data entry

As a continuation of the input competence, M-Files allows customers to identify and extract data from purchase order domains to facilitate the mechanization and conveying process. Moreover, M-Files permits you to input any relevant company rules, approval terms and contains database lookups to assist in guaranteeing accuracy during the process.

Matching and coding

As an advanced feature-set, M-Files could execute matching of POs and GL coding of non-PO invoices in your ERP system to facilitate structure and delivery.

Mechanized approvals

The M-Files solution can manage and automate as much of the authorization procedure as you wish. This contains handling, response, queues, routing, and aging accounts. Any purchase request that falls short of the validation process can be amended physically and then put back into the automation flow for approval.

Automatic storage of approved POs

After approval has been issued, purchase requisitions can be transmitted to finance automatically to finalize development and storage in a central cache.

How Wave Can Help You Implement Your Purchase Order Automation Platform in North Las Vegas

Keeping your organization competitive these days requires simplifying your procedures and eliminating the impasses from your systems that decrease your capability and efficacy. Additionally, it requires selecting the right business tools to complete your strategic growth objectives.

At Wave, we can help by analyzing the foundational aspects of your business and through incremental digital conversion and company workflow automation, reform them.

We utilize a combination of innovations based on your company necessities to digitize your laborious processes around collecting, organizing, and registering data so that it's uncomplicated to find and use whenever, from wherever.

We can help you to custom-tailor your AP digitization tool to satisfy your business's precise needs and we gladly collaborate with upwards of 60 industry-recognized ECM and DMS tools including M-Files, SharePoint, OpenText, and Oracle.

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