SharePoint vs M-Files: The Platform For AP Efficiency & Purchase Order Automation in

Developing efficiencies in your organizational workflows is a critical initial step toward digital switch-over, back-office upgrading, and giving your organization an upper hand in an increasingly aggressive professional sector.

Concrete systems and disjointed processes with logjams make collaboration, productivity, transparency, and responsibility to shareholders notably complicated.

With accounts payable automation, you could achieve paperless operations into your business and streamline tasks like purchase requisitions, invoicing, payment processing, procurement, and data entry processes.

Automating these kinds of business operations generates more proficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), higher cost reductions, and reformed employment of your manpower.

In this handbook, we’re evaluating a duo of the most popular tools geared toward AP efficiency and purchase request mechanization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our objective is to aid you in selecting the appropriate toolset and partner so you may expand and accelerate your AP digital revamping.

But prior to beginning our product analysis, let’s discuss what purchase requisition digitization is and how it creates higher efficiency for your AP operations.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the concept of utilizing business solutions with machine learning (ML), robotic technology, and artificial intelligence (AI) to digitize the purchase request system and its related workflows.

By means of mechanization, purchase requests may be automatically transmitted to the relevant party to initiate the authorization process. Later, as soon as the order is confirmed, it is automatically sent to the vendor.

While this may not appear to be significant at first glance, automating the procurement process removes the necessity for a by-hand process, tangible schemes, and streamlines the standard time-consuming workflow.

For instance, with purchase requisition solution or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform, you can create electronic purchase requests that contractors can acknowledge and then have the information mechanically incorporated into your accounting tool.

This presumably minuscule ability substantially streamlines the system, dramatically lessens the requirement for human meddling, and thus, enhances productivity inside your Accounts Payable department.

The Benefits of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We covered a number of the advantages of AP automation in the former chapter, but just to make sure you get the idea, let's break these benefits down in the simplest terms.

• Digitized data entry and storage

• Improved productivity with extra digitization and less human meddling

• Enhanced reliability due to less manual blunders

• Enhanced transparency into systems with your automated workflows

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

• Enhanced supply network and supplier relationships and self-operated portal

• Greater capability to regulate for safety and amenability

Now that we’ve gone over what AP and electronic purchase order is, how it functions, and why it’s important, let’s get into our platform review on Sharepoint vs M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

In this chapter, we’re going to first take a look at a straightforward evaluation between the rate and competencies of SharePoint along with M-Files, and then an extensive review on their AP and purchase order mechanization capabilities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

Although this chapter presents a fine conventional side-by-side evaluation, it doesn’t tell us much about how these tools administer tasks like electronic purchase order. Thus in this next portion, we’re going to do a summary of each program and how it administers this essential operation.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

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

When it comes to purchase order automation, SharePoint allows you to handle the entirety of problems you could be experiencing with your existing, physical purchase request system.

Order Tracking

To start, by utilizing Microsoft SharePoint and incorporating Office 365 programs, team members can track purchase orders at all level from request authorizations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also enable your company to adapt your digital purchase request scheme to your individual guidelines and necessities.

Components you can individualize within SharePoint comprise of the format of the purchase request forms, multi-level approvals, role assignments, line items, and filters based on type, payment terms, location, and more.

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 can also promote correspondence across divisions. As soon as the PO procedure has commenced, SharePoint may prompt an automated email to all respective parties to inform them that the operation has commenced and once more when it’s carried out.

Interactive Dashboards

Another critical component of mechanization is the insight into productivity and workflow perceptibility. SharePoint enables this by allowing you to supervise purchase request progress with an interactive dashboard.

Via the dashboard system, you can track purchase requisition history throughout divisions, distinguish the evaluation of approval vs denial percentage, and follow the state of ongoing POs.

Powerful Integrations

SharePoint also provides great adaptability in that it can integrate with most solutions across departments for improved cooperation.

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

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

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a powerful enterprise content management (ECM) tool that presents both on-site, cloud solutions, or a hybrid adaptation depending on your organizational needs.

Its interface is modeled off the Windows Explorer web browser making it easy to figure out and perform for departments that are accustomed to the Windows ecosystem.

Additionally, M-Files offers state-of-the-art functionality that allows companies to digitize operations and processes suchlike purchase request automation. Let’s study those capabilities.

Input

With M-Files you could gather invoices from primary or assigned sites and digitize the ingestion of important data associated with your purchase order and authorization workflows.

Data entry

In addition to the input capability, M-Files allows customers to pinpoint and pull out information from purchase order domains to promote the automation and conveying process. Moreover, M-Files enables you to input any relevant business rules, approval details and includes archive lookups to help ensure precision during the process.

Matching and coding

As a cutting-edge feature-set, M-Files can carry out corresponding of POs and GL coding of non-PO statements in your ERP system to facilitate arrangement and routing.

Digitized approvals

The M-Files platform can control and digitize as much of the approval workflow as you desire. This includes managing, routing, response, queues, and aging records. Any purchase requisition that fails the authorization procedure can be corrected physically and then reinstated into the mechanization flow for approval.

Automatic storage of approved POs

After authorization has been accepted, purchase requests can be forwarded to finance spontaneously to conclude handling and storage in a main cache.

How Wave Can Assist You in Enforcing Your Purchase Order Automation Tool in

Keeping your company cutthroat nowadays means streamlining your procedures and uprooting the bottlenecks from your undertakings that work to diminish your proficiency and output. It also involves picking the right business tools to accomplish your calculated growth aims.

At Wave, we can assist by analyzing the essential elements of your organization and through gradual digital transformation and organizational process automation, revamp them.

We apply a combination of innovations in accordance with your company requirements to automate your laborious workflows around gathering, organizing, and cataloging data so that it's easy to locate and use whenever, from any location.

We can help you to custom-tailor your AP automation solution to fit your business's precise needs and we willingly collaborate with more than 60 industry-acknowledged ECM and DMS platforms including SharePoint, OpenText, M-Files, and Oracle.

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