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

Creating competencies in your business workflows is a critical opening step toward digital switch-over, back-office modernization, and giving your company an edge in a growingly competitive professional industry.

Tangible systems and incoherent systems with bottlenecks make cooperation, productivity, visibility, and accountability to partners quite complex.

Through accounts payable mechanization, you may achieve paperless systems into your organization and expedite tasks like purchase requests, payment processing, procurement, invoicing, and data logging processes.

Mechanizing these types of business workflows produces more proficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), greater expenditure cuts, and reformed utilization of your personnel.

Within this manual, we’re examining a duo of the most prevalent solutions used for AP productivity and purchase request mechanization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our target is to aid you in selecting the right toolset and collaborate so you could develop and speed up your AP digital revamping.

But prior to beginning our product review, let’s discuss what purchase order mechanization is and how it produces greater productivity for your AP processes.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the process of utilizing business solutions through robotic technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to mechanize the purchase request operation and its related workflows.

By means of automation, purchase orders may be automatically forwarded to the fitting party to start the authorization routine. Later, immediately after the order is approved, it is mechanically sent to the supplier.

Although this may not appear to be significant at first glance, digitizing the purchasing operation removes the requirement for a by-hand process, paper-based systems, and expedites the usual time-consuming workflow.

For example, with purchase request software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform, you can produce electronic purchase requisitions that vendors can acknowledge followed by having the data automatically integrated into your accounting software.

This superficially small capability greatly simplifies the system, drastically reduces the demand for by-hand meddling, and therefore, amplifies productivity inside your Accounts Payable department.

The Perks of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We covered various of the benefits of AP digitization in the preceding portion, but to be certain that you get the point, let's take these advantages apart in plain language.

• Digitized data entry and storage

• Enhanced competence via more digitization and less by-hand intervention

• Improved precision because of less human error

• Enhanced visibility into systems via mechanized tasks

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

• Enhanced supply network and vendor connections and self-operated portal

• Enhanced ability to regulate for protection and amenability

Now that we’ve discussed what AP and electronic purchase order is, how it works, and why it’s vital, let’s get into our platform assessment on Sharepoint as opposed to M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

Coming in this section, we’re going to first take a look at a fundamental analysis between the pricing and aptitudes of SharePoint along with M-Files, and then an extensive review on their AP and purchase order automation capabilities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

While this chapter presents a fine standard simultaneous evaluation, it doesn’t tell us much about how these programs manage tasks such as electronic purchase order. Thus in this following portion, we’re giving a synopsis of each tool and how it handles this important undertaking.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is one of the most widely known and endorsed enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS solutions, due to its strong association with diverse famed Microsoft solutions like Outlook, Word, and Excel.

As it relates to purchase request mechanization, SharePoint enables you to address the entirety of concerns you could be confronting with your current, by-hand purchase order arrangement.

Order Tracking

To initiate, by using Microsoft SharePoint and incorporating Office 365 applications, team members may monitor purchase orders at any level from request confirmations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also enable your organization to customize your digital purchase request system to your specific guidelines and needs.

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

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 can also promote communication among divisions. As soon as the PO process has begun, SharePoint could trigger an automated email to all respective teams to alert them that the procedure has commenced and once more as soon as it’s accomplished.

Interactive Dashboards

One more critical aspect of digitization is the clarity into productivity and workflow perceptibility. SharePoint provides this by permitting you to monitor purchase requisition progress through an interactive dashboard.

Via the dashboard framework, you may monitor purchase requisition history across sections, distinguish the analysis of approval vs denial ratio, and follow the position of POs in progress.

Vigorous Integrations

Moreover, SharePoint provides terrific versatility in that it can work with with most tools across departments for increased collaboration.

Such as, if a branch submits a purchase order for a network printer; when the request is actioned, SharePoint can spontaneously generate an entry in your finance software for the new IT asset.

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

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a vigorous enterprise content management (ECM) tool that provides both local, cloud solutions, or a hybrid variant depending on your organizational needs.

Its interface is derived from the Windows Explorer web browser making it convenient to figure out and execute for departments that are used to the Windows interface.

Additionally, M-Files offers advanced functionality that enables companies to digitize operations and processes suchlike purchase requisition automation. Let’s take a look at those competencies.

Input

With M-Files you can capture invoices from main or distributed sites and automate the ingestion of important data related to your purchase order and authorization workflows.

Data entry

As an extension of the input aptitude, M-Files enables customers to distinguish and pull out details from purchase requisition fields to promote the automation and conveying process. Additionally, M-Files enables you to input any appropriate organizational codes, validation details and incorporates archive lookups to help ensure precision during the operation.

Matching and coding

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

Automated approvals

The M-Files solution can manage and mechanize as much of the confirmation procedure as you wish. This contains handling, routing, response, queues, and aging reports. Any purchase request that falls short of the approval course can be corrected by hand and then put back into the digitization flow for authorization.

Automatic storage of approved POs

After validation has been granted, purchase requisitions can be forwarded to finance spontaneously to finalize development and storage in a primary database.

How Wave Can Help You Implement Your Purchase Order Automation Tool in San Antonio

Holding your company competitive these days means streamlining your procedures and uprooting the bottlenecks from your workflows that work to diminish your efficiency and output. Moreover, it involves choosing the proper business tools to accomplish your strategic growth goals.

At Wave, we can help by studying the foundational elements of your organization and via gradual digital transformation and organizational workflow automation, transform them.

We utilize a consolidation of innovations appertaining to your business requirements to mechanize your repetitive tasks around gathering, organizing, and filing data so that it's simple to find and utilize whenever, from any location.

We can be of assistance in individualizing your AP digitization software to fulfill your company’s precise demands and we willingly work with over 60 industry-acknowledged ECM and DMS tools including M-Files, SharePoint, OpenText, and Oracle.

If you’re ready to learn more, reach out today and we can set up a time to chat.