SharePoint vs M-Files: The Platform For AP Proficiency & Purchase Order Automation in Stockton
Creating capabilities in your company processes is a pivotal first step toward digital switch-over, back-office innovation, and giving your business an upper hand in an increasingly aggressive professional industry.
Tangible arrangements and disjointed workflows with logjams make cooperation, productivity, transparency, and liability to shareholders very complex.
Through accounts payable digitization, you can implement cloud-based operations into your organization and simplify workflows like purchase requisitions, procurement, invoicing, payment processing, and data input tasks.
Digitizing these kinds of organizational workflows produces more capacity in enterprise resource planning (ERP), greater expenditure cuts, and reformed application of your manpower.
In this guide, we’re examining two of the most famous solutions designed for AP efficiency and purchase requisition mechanization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our target is to help you select the proper tech stack and partner so you could develop and speed up your AP digital revamping.
But before we begin with our product review, let’s talk through what purchase request automation is and how it generates greater efficiency for your AP workflows.
What is Purchase Order Automation?
Purchase order automation is the concept of using business solutions via robotic technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to automate the purchase requisition process and its related undertakings.
Through automation, purchase orders could be mechanically transmitted to the appropriate company to begin the authorization process. Then, once the request is approved, it is automatically forwarded to the supplier.
Although this may not look like much at first glance, mechanizing the buying process abolishes the requirement for a physical process, tangible schemes, and streamlines the standard labor-intensive workflow.
For example, with purchase order software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool, you can create automated purchase requests that contractors can comprehend and then have the information spontaneously incorporated into your accounting tool.
This seemingly minor capability substantially simplifies the system, remarkably lessens the need for human meddling, and therefore, improves productivity inside your Accounts Payable section.
The Perks of AP and Purchase Order Automation
We discussed various of the benefits of AP automation in the preceding portion, but to guarantee that you understand, let's dissect these advantages in the simplest terms.
Mechanized data input and storage
Greater competence with more mechanization and less human meddling
Enhanced precision due to less physical faults
Greater visibility into procedures with your digitized processes
Real-time analytics, auditing, and reporting to uphold the development of performances
Improved supply network and vendor relationships and self-service portal
Enhanced ability to monitor for security and amenability
Since we’ve reviewed what AP and electronic purchase order is, how it works, and why it’s vital, let’s start our product review on Sharepoint as opposed to M-Files.
Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review
Coming in this chapter, we’re reviewing a fundamental breakdown between the pricing and competencies of SharePoint and M-Files, followed by an extensive review on their AP and purchase requisition automation qualities.
Basic Price and Features Breakdown
While this portion presents a decent general simultaneous analogy, it doesn’t inform us on how these tools handle tasks like digital purchase order. So in this succeeding section, we’re providing a synopsis of each program and how it handles this important operation.
Microsoft SharePoint Overview
SharePoint is amongst the most prominent and endorsed enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS platforms, because of its strong association with other famed Microsoft programs like Outlook, Word, and Excel.
When it comes to purchase request mechanization, SharePoint enables you to handle all the concerns you may be confronting with your current, manual purchase order scheme.
Order Tracking
To start, by using Microsoft SharePoint and integrating Office 365 applications, personnel may monitor purchase orders at every level from request authorizations to delivery.
Customization
SharePoint and Office 365 also allow your organization to customize your automated purchase order system to your particular guidelines and needs.
Elements you could individualize within SharePoint involve the format of the purchase requisition forms, multi-level approvals, role assignments, line items, and filters appertaining to type, payment terms, location, and more.
Communication
SharePoint and Office 365 can also facilitate connection between divisions. When the PO procedure has commenced, SharePoint may prompt a mechanized email to all respective parties to inform them that the procedure has commenced and once more as soon as it’s accomplished.
Interactive Dashboards
A further significant aspect of digitization is the foresight into capability and workflow transparency. SharePoint delivers this by permitting you to oversee purchase request progress with an interactive dashboard.
Via the dashboard setup, you can track purchase requisition history among sections, see the evaluation of approval vs denial percentage, and monitor the status of ongoing POs.
Powerful Integrations
SharePoint also offers superb adaptability in that it can incorporate with most tools across departments for greater collaboration.
For instance, if a division submits a purchase requisition for a network printer; when the requisition is handled, SharePoint can mechanically generate an entry in your finance tool 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) tool that offers both local, cloud solutions, or a hybrid adaptation determined by your organizational needs.
Its interface is based off of the Windows Explorer web browser making it easy to learn and implement for teams that are comfortable with the Windows ecosystem.
Furthermore, M-Files grants advanced functionality that empowers companies to digitize workflows and processes like purchase requisition automation. Let’s study those competencies.
Input
With M-Files you may gather invoices from central or assigned locations and mechanize the ingestion of significant data linked to your purchase requisition and authorization undertaking.
Data entry
As an extension of the input capability, M-Files enables clients to distinguish and pull out data from purchase request areas to facilitate the mechanization and conveying process. Furthermore, M-Files allows you to input any pertinent business codes, confirmation details and incorporates archive searches to assist in guaranteeing accuracy across the procedure.
Matching and coding
As a state-of-the-art functional scope, M-Files can perform corresponding of POs and GL coding of non-PO invoices in your ERP procedure to streamline structure and routing.
Automated approvals
The M-Files system can control and mechanize as much of the authorization workflow as you wish. This contains overseeing, routing, response, queues, and aging accounts. Any purchase order that fails the approval process can be corrected by hand and then put back into the mechanization flow for authorization.
Automatic storage of approved POs
After validation has been accepted, purchase requests can be sent to finance spontaneously to wrap up handling and storage in a primary database.
How Wave Can Help You Implement Your Purchase Order Automation Tool in Stockton
Keeping your organization fierce nowadays involves streamlining your processes and eliminating the hindrances from your undertakings that mitigate your proficiency and productivity. Additionally, it requires choosing the appropriate business systems to complete your calculated growth aims.
At Wave, we can assist by examining the essential pieces of your company and via step-by-step digital transformation and business process automation, revamp them.
We utilize a blended set of technology appertaining to your company needs to mechanize your repetitive processes around capturing, arranging, and cataloging data so that it's simple to track down and utilize whenever, from any location.
We can be of assistance in individualizing your AP digitization tool to satisfy your business's precise requirements and we happily work with upwards of 60 industry-accepted ECM and DMS tools including SharePoint, OpenText, M-Files, and Oracle.
If you’re ready to learn more, contact us today and we can set up a time to chat.