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

Generating capabilities in your business operations is a crucial first phase toward digital switch-over, back-office innovation, and supplying your company an advantage in an increasingly competitive professional sector.

Concrete operations and incoherent workflows with impasses make synergy, productivity, visibility, and accountability to shareholders very complicated.

Through accounts payable digitization, you could implement paperless systems into your organization and simplify workflows like purchase requisitions, invoicing, payment processing, procurement, and data input workflows.

Automating these types of company processes creates more proficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), greater cost reductions, and improved employment of your human resources.

Within this guide, we’re evaluating two of the most famous solutions used for AP efficiency and purchase requisition mechanization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our goal is to help you select the appropriate tech stack and partner so you could augment and speed up your AP digital revamping.

But before we begin with our product assessment, let’s do a quick review of what purchase requisition automation is and how it creates further efficiency for your AP operations.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the notion of using business tools via artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotic technology to digitize the purchase order system and its synonymous undertakings.

Via digitization, purchase requisitions may be automatically transmitted to the fitting party to initiate the approval procedure. Then, immediately after the order is approved, it is instinctively sent to the vendor.

Although this may not seem like much at first read, mechanizing the buying procedure abolishes the requirement for a manual process, materialized schemes, and simplifies the standard laborious workflow.

For example, with purchase request solution or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, you can produce electronic purchase orders that contractors can comprehend followed by having the information mechanically incorporated into your accounting platform.

This presumably minuscule ability greatly streamlines the process, dramatically reduces the requirement for human intervention, and therefore, enhances productivity through your Accounts Payable division.

The Benefits of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We discussed a number of the benefits of AP automation in the previous section, but to guarantee that you get the idea, let's dissect these advantages in absolute terms.

• Automated data logging and storage

• Enhanced efficiency with further mechanization and less manual intervention

• Greater accuracy due to less human error

• Enhanced perceptibility into operations through your mechanized workflows

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

• Enhanced logistics process and supplier affinities and self-service portal

• Enhanced ability to monitor for safety and amenability

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

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

In this section, we’re examining a straightforward analysis between the costing and competencies of SharePoint and M-Files, succeeded by an in-depth analysis on their AP and purchase order digitization qualities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

Though this section provides a decent conventional side-by-side analogy, it doesn’t educate us on how these tools manage processes namely electronic purchase order. Therefore in this succeeding chapter, we’re providing a synopsis of each solution and how it handles this significant undertaking.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is one of the most recognized and accepted enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS tools, due to its deep connection with other prevalent Microsoft tools like Excel, Outlook, and Word.

As it relates to purchase request automation, SharePoint allows you to address the entirety of issues you may be experiencing with your current, manual purchase requisition scheme.

Order Tracking

To begin, by using Microsoft SharePoint and combining Office 365 tools, team members can monitor purchase requests at any stage from request authorizations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also empower your business to adapt your electronic purchase request arrangement to your specific instructions and necessities.

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

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 could also further communication among departments. When the PO process has started, SharePoint may actuate an automated email to all appropriate parties to inform them that the operation has commenced and again once it’s accomplished.

Interactive Dashboards

One more critical element of digitization is the clarity into capability and workflow perceptibility. SharePoint provides this by authorizing you to supervise purchase request progress via an interactive dashboard.

With the dashboard framework, you can track purchase requisition history throughout divisions, see the breakdown of approval vs denial percentage, and track the position of ongoing POs.

Vigorous Integrations

Furthermore, SharePoint provides great versatility in that it can integrate with most programs between departments for greater cooperation.

Such as, if a department submits a purchase order for a network printer; when the order is handled, SharePoint can spontaneously develop an entry in your finance software for the new IT resource.

Now that we’ve learned about what SharePoint can accomplish in terms of aiding you in digitizing your AP processes, let’s continue to M-Files.

M-Files Overview

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

Its interface is modeled off the Windows Explorer web engine making it easy to understand and perform for parties that are comfortable with the Windows operating system.

Furthermore, M-Files provides innovative functionality that enables companies to mechanize workflows and processes like purchase order automation. Let’s study those capabilities.

Input

With M-Files you could gather invoices from central or distributed locations and mechanize the ingestion of important data associated with your purchase requisition and authorization processes.

Data entry

As a continuation of the input aptitude, M-Files allows clients to pinpoint and pull out information from purchase requisition domains to promote the mechanization and transmission process. Additionally, M-Files allows you to input any relevant business regulations, confirmation specifications and incorporates directory lookups to assist in guaranteeing precision across the process.

Matching and coding

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

Mechanized approvals

The M-Files platform can regulate and automate as much of the authorization workflow as you wish. This involves overseeing, queues, routing, response, and aging records. Any purchase request that falls short of the approval process can be corrected by hand and then put back into the automation flow for authorization.

Automatic storage of approved POs

After approval has been accepted, purchase orders can be forwarded to finance mechanically to wrap up processing and storage in a central database.

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

Keeping your company cutthroat today requires rationalizing your operations and removing the bottlenecks from your workflows that decrease your proficiency and output. Moreover, it involves picking the appropriate business systems to accomplish your strategic growth goals.

At Wave, we can help by analyzing the fundamental aspects of your company and via step-by-step digital transformation and organizational system automation, revamp them.

We utilize a consolidation of innovations appertaining to your business necessities to digitize your repetitive tasks around capturing, organizing, and filing data so that it's easy to find and use at any time, from anywhere.

We can be of assistance in individualizing your AP digitization tool to fulfill your company’s specific demands and we happily work with upwards of 60 industry-accepted ECM and DMS platforms including M-Files, SharePoint, OpenText, and Oracle.

If you’re interested in learning more, connect with us today and we can arrange a time to chat.