SharePoint vs M-Files: The Tool For AP Productivity & Purchase Order Automation in Irvine

Creating competencies in your organizational processes is a critical opening stage toward digital switch-over, back-office modernization, and giving your company an edge in a growingly aggressive professional landscape.

Tangible operations and fragmented processes with impasses make collaboration, productivity, transparency, and responsibility to partners notably difficult.

By means of accounts payable digitization, you could carry out cloud-based arrangements into your organization and expedite duties like purchase orders, invoicing, payment processing, procurement, and data input workflows.

Automating these types of organizational operations produces more efficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), better cost savings, and improved employment of your manpower.

In this manual, we’re evaluating two of the most famous solutions geared toward AP proficiency and purchase requisition automation: SharePoint and M-Files. Our target is to help you select the right tech stack and cooperate so you may expand and accelerate your AP digital switch-over.

But before we begin with our product analysis, let’s talk through what purchase requisition automation is and how it creates greater productivity for your AP operations.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

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

By means of digitization, purchase requests may be spontaneously forwarded to the appropriate party to start the approval routine. After, immediately after the requisition is approved, it is mechanically transmitted to the vendor.

While this may not look like much at first glance, digitizing the purchasing procedure eliminates the necessity for a by-hand process, tangible arrangements, and simplifies the often time-consuming workflow.

As an example, with purchase request solution or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform, you can create electronic purchase requests that vendors can acknowledge and then have the details automatically fused into your accounting tool.

This superficially minuscule ability substantially streamlines the system, drastically reduces the requirement for human intervention, and therefore, enhances proficiency within your Accounts Payable department.

The Benefits of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We talked about various of the advantages of AP digitization in the previous chapter, but to guarantee that you get the point, let's break these benefits down in the simplest terms.

• Mechanized data input and storage

• Greater competence via further digitization and less manual meddling

• Enhanced accuracy because of less human faults

• Increased visibility into operations through your mechanized tasks

• Actual-time reporting, analytics, and auditing to uphold the development of performances

• Reformed supply network and merchant affinities and self-managed portal

• Improved ability to oversee for safety and conformity

Since we’ve reviewed what AP and purchase order automation is, how it works, and why it’s vital, let’s begin our software assessment on Sharepoint vs M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

Coming in this chapter, we’re going to first take a look at a basic evaluation between the rate and competencies of SharePoint as well as M-Files, and then an extensive review on their AP and purchase request automation qualities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

Though this portion presents a fine standard simultaneous comparison, it doesn’t educate us on how these programs manage tasks such as purchase order automation. So in this succeeding section, we’re giving an overview of each solution and how it administers this essential task.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is amongst the most widely known and endorsed enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS tools, due to its close relation to diverse prevalent Microsoft solutions like Outlook, Word, and Excel.

In the context of purchase requisition mechanization, SharePoint enables you to resolve the entirety of problems you might be facing with your existing, by-hand purchase request scheme.

Order Tracking

To initiate, by employing Microsoft SharePoint and combining Office 365 programs, staff may oversee purchase requisitions at any stage from request authorizations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also allow your business to customize your electronic purchase order scheme to your particular instructions and necessities.

Aspects you could individualize within SharePoint include the template of the purchase requisition forms, line items, multi-level approvals, role assignments, and filters based on payment terms, location, type, and more.

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 may also promote communication among sectors. As soon as the PO operation has started, SharePoint could prompt an automated email to all appropriate teams to inform them that the process has started and again once it’s carried out.

Interactive Dashboards

A further critical component of automation is the foresight into efficiency and workflow visibility. SharePoint enables this by authorizing you to monitor purchase request progress with an interactive dashboard.

With the dashboard setup, you can track purchase order history throughout departments, distinguish the breakdown of approval vs denial percentage, and track the position of ongoing POs.

Powerful Integrations

SharePoint also enables great flexibility in that it can incorporate with most programs across departments for greater cooperation.

For example, if a branch delivers a purchase order for a network printer; as soon as the requisition is actioned, SharePoint can automatically produce an entry in your finance tool for the new IT asset.

Now that we’ve seen what SharePoint can do in terms of assisting you in automating your AP workflows, let’s move on to M-Files.

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a robust enterprise content management (ECM) tool that presents both local, cloud solutions, or a hybrid variant determined by your company demands.

Its interface is derived from the Windows Explorer web browser making it easy to learn and execute for teams that are accustomed to the Windows ecosystem.

Additionally, M-Files offers innovative functionality that enables companies to automate tasks and processes suchlike purchase order automation. Let’s examine those competencies.

Input

With M-Files you can gather invoices from primary or distributed areas and automate the collection of essential data linked to your purchase request and approval processes.

Data entry

In addition to the input aptitude, M-Files empowers customers to identify and pull out data from purchase request fields to facilitate the digitization and transmission process. Furthermore, M-Files allows you to input any appropriate organizational codes, approval specifications and includes database searches to assist in guaranteeing veracity during the operation.

Matching and coding

As a cutting-edge feature-set, M-Files could carry out matching of POs and GL coding of non-PO statements in your ERP procedure to facilitate structure and delivery.

Automated approvals

The M-Files system can manage and digitize as much of the authorization workflow as you want. This contains overseeing, queues, routing, response, and aging records. Any purchase request that flunks the approval course can be amended physically and then put back into the automation flow for validation.

Automatic storage of approved POs

Once validation has been accepted, purchase orders can be transmitted to finance spontaneously to finalize handling and storage in a primary database.

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

Keeping your company fierce nowadays requires streamlining your processes and uprooting the impasses from your workflows that mitigate your proficiency and efficacy. It also means picking the right business tools to accomplish your tactical growth objectives.

At Wave, we can assist by examining the foundational aspects of your company and with gradual digital transformation and business system automation, reform them.

We utilize a combination of technology appertaining to your company necessities to mechanize your tedious workflows around capturing, regulating, and filing data so that it's easy to locate and access at any time, from anywhere.

We can assist you in customizing your AP automation tool to satisfy your organization’s specific needs and we happily collaborate with over 60 industry-acknowledged ECM and DMS platforms including M-Files, SharePoint, OpenText, and Oracle.

If you’re interested in learning more, reach out today and we can arrange a time to chat.