SharePoint vs M-Files: The Tool For AP Productivity & Purchase Order Automation in Chula Vista

Generating capabilities in your organizational processes is a crucial first stage toward digital transformation, back-office upgrading, and giving your organization an edge in a progressively cutthroat professional landscape.

Tangible operations and disjointed processes with bottlenecks make synergy, efficacy, transparency, and liability to partners quite complex.

By means of accounts payable automation, you could carry out cloud-based arrangements into your company and expedite duties like purchase requests, invoicing, payment processing, procurement, and data entry processes.

Digitizing these types of business workflows creates more proficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), higher expenditure cuts, and improved application of your personnel.

Included in this handbook, we’re evaluating a couple of the most prevalent tools designed for AP proficiency and purchase requisition digitization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our target is to assist you in selecting the right solutions stack and partner so you could develop and accelerate your AP digital switch-over.

But prior to beginning our product assessment, let’s talk through what purchase order automation is and how it produces further capability for your AP workflows.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

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

Via mechanization, purchase requests can be spontaneously forwarded to the fitting party to initiate the validation procedure. Then, immediately after the request is authorized, it is instinctively forwarded to the merchant.

Although this may not seem like much at first read, automating the purchasing process removes the need for a by-hand process, materialized arrangements, and streamlines the often labor-intensive workflow.

As an example, with purchase requisition solution or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool, you can create digital purchase requests that suppliers can identify and then have the details spontaneously fused into your accounting tool.

This superficially minor aptitude significantly simplifies the system, remarkably reduces the need for by-hand intervention, and therefore, enhances efficiency through your Accounts Payable division.

The Advantages of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We talked about a number of the advantages of AP mechanization in the former section, but to be certain that you get the point, let's break these benefits down in the simplest terms.

• Digitized data entry and storage

• Greater efficiency with more digitization and less human interference

• Improved accuracy because of less physical faults

• Increased transparency into procedures through your automated tasks

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

• Reformed logistics chain and supplier affinities and self-service portal

• Enhanced aptitude to oversee for safety and conformity

Since we’ve discussed what AP and purchase order automation is, how it operates, and why it’s vital, let’s start our software assessment on Sharepoint as opposed to M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

In this section, we’re going to first take a look at a basic evaluation between the costing and capabilities of SharePoint as well as M-Files, and then an in-depth analysis on their AP and purchase order digitization potential.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

While this chapter gives a decent conventional simultaneous analogy, it doesn’t inform us on how these tools manage workflows namely purchase order automation. So in this following section, we’re going to do an overview of each program and how it manages this significant task.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is one of the most recognized and endorsed enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS solutions, owing to its close relation to diverse famed Microsoft solutions like Excel, Outlook, and Word.

In the context of purchase requisition mechanization, SharePoint enables you to address the entirety of concerns you may be facing with your present-day, physical purchase request system.

Order Tracking

To initiate, by employing Microsoft SharePoint and incorporating Office 365 programs, team members may monitor purchase requests at any stage from request approvals to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also empower your business to tailor your electronic purchase request system to your individual guidelines and necessities.

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

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 can also further connection among departments. As soon as the PO procedure has started, SharePoint can actuate a mechanized email to all relevant teams to alert them that the operation has started and once more when it’s carried out.

Interactive Dashboards

Another significant element of automation is the foresight into capability and workflow perceptibility. SharePoint enables this by permitting you to monitor purchase order progress through an interactive dashboard.

With the dashboard system, you may track purchase order history throughout divisions, see the analysis of approval vs denial percentage, and monitor the status of ongoing POs.

Powerful Integrations

Furthermore, SharePoint provides great flexibility in that it can work with with most solutions among departments for greater synergy.

For instance, if a division submits a purchase request for a network printer; when the requisition is handled, SharePoint can mechanically produce an entry in your finance software for the new IT resource.

Now that we’ve discussed what SharePoint is capable of in terms of aiding you in digitizing your AP workflows, let’s continue to M-Files.

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a robust enterprise content management (ECM) tool that offers both on-premise, cloud solutions, or a hybrid version contingent on your company needs.

Its interface is modeled off the Windows Explorer internet browser making it simple to understand and implement for parties that are used to the Windows operating system.

Moreover, M-Files grants state-of-the-art functionality that allows companies to automate operations and processes such as purchase request automation. Let’s examine those aptitudes.

Input

With M-Files you can acquire invoices from central or distributed locations and mechanize the collection of important data associated with your purchase request and approval processes.

Data entry

As a continuation of the input aptitude, M-Files empowers users to pinpoint and extract information from purchase requisition fields to facilitate the mechanization and transmission process. Moreover, M-Files permits you to input any pertinent organizational regulations, confirmation terms and includes database searches to assist in ensuring precision during the procedure.

Matching and coding

As an advanced functionality, M-Files can execute matching of POs and GL coding of non-PO statements in your ERP procedure to simplify structure and routing.

Automated approvals

The M-Files platform can manage and mechanize as much of the authorization workflow as you want. This involves managing, routing, response, queues, and aging reports. Any purchase request that fails the validation process can be revised by hand and then reinstated into the mechanization flow for authorization.

Automatic storage of approved POs

As soon as approval has been issued, purchase requests can be transmitted to finance automatically to finalize handling and storage in a central database.

How Wave Can Help You Implement Your Purchase Order Automation Platform in Chula Vista

Keeping your company competitive nowadays requires streamlining your operations and removing the impasses from your systems that mitigate your proficiency and efficacy. Moreover, it means picking the right business solutions to accomplish your strategic growth goals.

At Wave, we can assist by examining the essential pieces of your organization and with gradual digital switch-over and business process automation, transform them.

We utilize a combination of innovations based on your company needs to automate your repetitive processes around gathering, regulating, and cataloging data so that it's simple to track down and utilize whenever, from wherever.

We can be of assistance in individualizing your AP mechanization solution to fulfill your company’s particular requirements and we happily go along with upwards of 60 industry-accepted ECM and DMS tools including M-Files, SharePoint, OpenText, and Oracle.

If you’re ready to learn more, connect with us today and we can set up a time to chat.