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

Creating capabilities in your organizational operations is a crucial initial step toward digital switch-over, back-office innovation, and supplying your company an upper hand in an increasingly competitive professional landscape.

Paper-based arrangements and fragmented processes with bottlenecks make cooperation, productivity, visibility, and accountability to stakeholders quite complex.

Through accounts payable mechanization, you may implement paperless operations into your business and expedite workflows like purchase requisitions, invoicing, payment processing, procurement, and data entry processes.

Automating these forms of business processes produces more capacity in enterprise resource planning (ERP), better expenditure cuts, and improved employment of your human resources.

In this manual, we’re reviewing two of the most prevalent solutions used for AP proficiency and purchase request digitization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our target is to help you select the right solutions stack and partner so you can augment and speed up your AP digital switch-over.

But prior to starting our product assessment, let’s discuss what purchase order automation is and how it creates further productivity for your AP operations.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the process of employing business tools via robotic technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to automate the purchase requisition process and its corresponding workflows.

By means of automation, purchase requests can be spontaneously forwarded to the relevant party to begin the approval process. Later, as soon as the requisition is authorized, it is mechanically transmitted to the vendor.

While this may not seem like much at first read, automating the purchasing process removes the necessity for a physical process, tangible schemes, and simplifies the often laborious workflow.

For example, with purchase order software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform, you can produce digital purchase orders that suppliers can acknowledge and then have the data mechanically incorporated into your accounting software.

This seemingly small aptitude substantially simplifies the system, remarkably lessens the requirement for manual meddling, and therefore, amplifies efficiency inside 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 portion, but to guarantee that you get the idea, let's break these benefits down in plain language.

• Automated data input and storage

• Improved productivity with more digitization and less by-hand intervention

• Greater accuracy due to less physical blunders

• Greater transparency into operations with your automated processes

• Real-time auditing, reporting, and analytics to continue to improve capacities

• Improved distribution network and vendor connections and self-managed portal

• Improved ability to oversee for protection and amenability

So now that we’ve reviewed what AP and electronic purchase order is, how it works, and why it’s significant, let’s get into our software evaluation on Sharepoint as opposed to M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

Within this section, we’re examining a fundamental evaluation between the rate and competencies of SharePoint as well as M-Files, and then a deeper dive on their AP and purchase requisition mechanization qualities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

While this section provides a decent conventional simultaneous comparison, it doesn’t inform us on how these tools manage tasks namely digital purchase order. Thus in this succeeding chapter, we’re giving a summary of each program and how it manages this significant operation.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is one of the more recognized and endorsed enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS platforms, because of its strong association with different prevalent Microsoft programs like Word, Excel, and Outlook.

When it comes to purchase requisition mechanization, SharePoint allows you to handle all the concerns you might be facing with your present-day, manual purchase order arrangement.

Order Tracking

To begin, by using Microsoft SharePoint and combining Office 365 applications, team members can track purchase orders at every phase from request approvals to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also empower your organization to customize your automated purchase request scheme to your particular instructions and requirements.

Aspects you can individualize within SharePoint involve the template of the purchase request forms, line items, multi-level approvals, role assignments, and filters appertaining to location, type, payment terms, and more.

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 can also facilitate correspondence between departments. When the PO process has started, SharePoint may prompt a programmed email to all appropriate teams to notify them that the procedure has begun and once more as soon as it’s accomplished.

Interactive Dashboards

A further critical aspect of automation is the clarity into efficiency and workflow perceptibility. SharePoint enables this by allowing you to monitor purchase requisition progress with an interactive dashboard.

With the dashboard framework, you may track purchase requisition history across divisions, distinguish the breakdown of approval vs denial ratio, and monitor the state of ongoing POs.

Vigorous Integrations

Moreover, SharePoint enables great adaptability in that it can integrate with most tools between departments for greater cooperation.

Such as, if a department presents a purchase request for a network printer; when the order is actioned, SharePoint can automatically develop an entry in your finance solution for the new IT resource.

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

M-Files Overview

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

Its interface is based off of the Windows Explorer web engine making it simple to learn and perform for departments that are used to the Windows interface.

Furthermore, M-Files grants state-of-the-art functionality that enables companies to automate tasks and processes suchlike purchase order automation. Let’s take a look at those aptitudes.

Input

With M-Files you can capture invoices from main or allocated areas and mechanize the ingestion of essential data related to your purchase requisition and authorization undertaking.

Data entry

As a continuation of the input competence, M-Files enables customers to distinguish and withdraw details from purchase requisition domains to promote the automation and conveying process. Furthermore, M-Files enables you to input any pertinent business regulations, confirmation specifications and includes database lookups to assist in guaranteeing veracity during the process.

Matching and coding

As an advanced feature-set, M-Files can perform conforming of POs and GL coding of non-PO billing statements in your ERP system to simplify arrangement and transmission.

Digitized approvals

The M-Files solution can control and automate as much of the authorization workflow as you wish. This involves managing, response, queues, routing, and aging reports. Any purchase order that fails the validation course can be amended physically and then reinstated into the automation flow for authorization.

Automatic storage of approved POs

After authorization has been accepted, purchase requisitions can be sent to finance automatically to wrap up handling and storage in a central cache.

How Wave Can Assist You in Enforcing Your Purchase Order Automation Solution in Chesapeake

Holding your business fierce these days requires simplifying your processes and eliminating the impasses from your workflows that decrease your efficiency and output. It also involves choosing the right business solutions to achieve your calculated growth aims.

At Wave, we can be of assistance by studying the fundamental elements of your business and with gradual digital switch-over and company system automation, reform them.

We apply a combination of technology appertaining to your company necessities to digitize your tedious tasks around collecting, arranging, and cataloging data so that it's simple to track down and utilize whenever, from wherever.

We can be of assistance in individualizing your AP digitization solution to satisfy your business's precise demands and we gladly go along with more than 60 industry-acknowledged ECM and DMS solutions including OpenText, M-Files, SharePoint, and Oracle.

If you’re interested in learning more, contact us today and we can schedule a time to chat.