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

Generating competencies in your company processes is a critical initial phase toward digital transformation, back-office innovation, and giving your business an edge in a progressively aggressive professional landscape.

Tangible systems and incoherent processes with bottlenecks make cooperation, efficiency, transparency, and responsibility to shareholders very complex.

By means of accounts payable mechanization, you can achieve cloud-based operations into your company and simplify workflows like purchase requests, procurement, invoicing, payment processing, and data entry processes.

Digitizing these forms of business workflows generates more capacity in enterprise resource planning (ERP), greater expenditure cuts, and improved utilization of your human resources.

In this guide, we’re examining two of the most famous tools geared toward AP productivity and purchase order digitization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our target is to assist you in selecting the right solutions stack and partner so you could expand and speed up your AP digital switch-over.

But before we begin with our product analysis, let’s discuss what purchase order digitization is and how it creates further efficiency for your AP workflows.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the notion of employing business software through robotic technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to mechanize the purchase request operation and its synonymous workflows.

By means of automation, purchase requisitions may be mechanically sent to the relevant company to initiate the validation procedure. After, immediately after the order is authorized, it is automatically transmitted to the vendor.

Though this may not appear to be significant at first glance, digitizing the buying operation removes the need for a manual process, materialized schemes, and simplifies the usual laborious workflow.

For instance, with purchase request software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform, you can produce digital purchase orders that contractors can acknowledge followed by having the information mechanically incorporated into your accounting platform.

This superficially small aptitude significantly streamlines the system, dramatically diminishes the demand for by-hand intervention, and therefore, enhances efficiency within your Accounts Payable section.

The Perks of AP and Purchase Order Automation

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

• Automated data input and storage

• Greater efficiency through extra digitization and less manual interference

• Enhanced reliability on account of less physical faults

• Greater transparency into procedures through your automated tasks

• Real-time auditing, reporting, and analytics to uphold the development of efficiencies

• Enhanced supply chain and merchant relationships and self-service portal

• Enhanced ability to monitor for safety and amenability

Now that we’ve gone over what AP and electronic purchase order is, how it works, and why it’s vital, let’s start our platform assessment on Sharepoint vs M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

Within this portion, we’re going to first take a look at a straightforward breakdown between the rate and capabilities of SharePoint and M-Files, followed by an extensive review on their AP and purchase requisition digitization qualities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

Though this portion presents a good general side-by-side analogy, it doesn’t tell us much about how these tools manage tasks namely purchase order automation. So in this succeeding section, we’re giving a synopsis of each program and how it manages this essential undertaking.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is amongst the most widely known and accepted enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS platforms, because of its close relation to other famed Microsoft programs like Outlook, Word, and Excel.

When it comes to purchase requisition automation, SharePoint enables you to resolve each one of the concerns you may be experiencing with your current, manual purchase request scheme.

Order Tracking

To initiate, by utilizing Microsoft SharePoint and incorporating Office 365 programs, staff could oversee purchase requests at all phase from request authorizations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also enable your business to adapt your digital purchase request scheme to your particular instructions and requirements.

Components you may individualize within SharePoint include 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 could also promote communication across sectors. When the PO operation has started, SharePoint can trigger a programmed email to all respective teams to notify them that the operation has started and once more when it’s carried out.

Interactive Dashboards

Another significant component of automation is the clarity into capability and workflow transparency. SharePoint provides this by permitting you to monitor purchase requisition progress through an interactive dashboard.

With the dashboard setup, you may monitor purchase requisition history among sections, view the evaluation of approval vs denial proportion, and monitor the status of existing POs.

Vigorous Integrations

Moreover, SharePoint enables superb adaptability in that it can work with with most programs across departments for greater synergy.

For example, if a branch delivers a purchase request for a network printer; once the request is actioned, SharePoint can mechanically produce an entry in your finance tool for the new IT asset.

Now that we’ve seen what SharePoint can do in terms of aiding you in digitizing your AP workflows, let’s proceed to M-Files.

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a vigorous enterprise content management (ECM) solution that presents both on-premise, cloud solutions, or a hybrid variant contingent on your business demands.

Its interface is modeled off the Windows Explorer internet browser making it simple to figure out and perform for departments that are comfortable with the Windows interface.

Moreover, M-Files grants advanced functionality that allows companies to automate tasks and processes suchlike purchase order automation. Let’s take a look at those capabilities.

Input

With M-Files you can acquire invoices from main or distributed areas and mechanize the ingestion of significant data linked to your purchase order and confirmation undertaking.

Data entry

As an extension of the input aptitude, M-Files empowers clients to distinguish and withdraw data from purchase requisition domains to promote the automation and transmission process. Furthermore, M-Files enables you to input any relevant organizational regulations, approval terms and includes database lookups to help ensure precision across the process.

Matching and coding

As a cutting-edge functional scope, M-Files may carry out matching of POs and GL coding of non-PO invoices in your ERP system to streamline arrangement and routing.

Digitized approvals

The M-Files system can manage and automate as much of the authorization workflow as you want. This contains managing, response, queues, routing, and aging accounts. Any purchase request that flunks the validation course can be revised by hand and then put back into the automation flow for approval.

Automatic storage of approved POs

Once approval has been granted, purchase requests can be sent to finance spontaneously to finalize processing and storage in a primary database.

How Wave Can Help You Implement Your Purchase Order Automation Solution in Tampa

Keeping your business cutthroat nowadays requires simplifying your processes and eliminating the impasses from your undertakings that mitigate your capability and productivity. Moreover, it means choosing the right business solutions to achieve your calculated growth aims.

At Wave, we can be of assistance by studying the foundational aspects of your business and via gradual digital transformation and company workflow automation, transform them.

We use a blended set of solutions in accordance with your business necessities to digitize your laborious workflows around collecting, organizing, and registering data so that it's simple to locate and access whenever, from wherever.

We can help you to custom-tailor your AP automation tool to fulfill your organization’s particular demands and we gladly work with more than 60 industry-recognized 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.