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

Creating competencies in your business processes is a crucial opening phase toward digital transformation, back-office modernization, and giving your organization an edge in an increasingly aggressive professional industry.

Concrete systems and incoherent systems with impasses make collaboration, efficacy, visibility, and accountability to shareholders very complicated.

Through accounts payable digitization, you could carry out dematerialized operations into your business and streamline workflows like purchase orders, procurement, invoicing, payment processing, and data input processes.

Automating these types of company processes creates more capacity in enterprise resource planning (ERP), better cost reductions, and reformed utilization of your personnel.

Within this guide, we’re reviewing a duo of the most prevalent tools used for AP productivity and purchase order mechanization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our objective is to help you select the proper toolset and cooperate so you can augment and expedite your AP digital revamping.

But prior to starting our product review, let’s discuss what purchase requisition mechanization is and how it creates higher efficiency for your AP workflows.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the concept of employing business software via robotic technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to automate the purchase request system and its synonymous undertakings.

By means of mechanization, purchase orders may be mechanically forwarded to the relevant team to start the approval routine. Later, as soon as the requisition is authorized, it is mechanically transmitted to the supplier.

Though this may not appear to be significant at first glance, digitizing the buying procedure removes the requirement for a physical process, tangible schemes, and streamlines the standard laborious workflow.

For instance, with purchase requisition software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, you can create electronic purchase requisitions that contractors can comprehend at which point the data automatically incorporated into your accounting tool.

This seemingly minuscule aptitude greatly streamlines the process, remarkably lessens the need for human interference, and therefore, amplifies productivity through your Accounts Payable division.

The Benefits of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We covered various of the benefits of AP mechanization in the previous section, but to be certain that you get the point, let's dissect these advantages in the simplest terms.

• Digitized data entry and storage

• Enhanced productivity via further mechanization and less by-hand intervention

• Greater reliability on account of less manual faults

• Enhanced visibility into systems with your mechanized processes

• Current-time reporting, analytics, and auditing to continue to improve efficiencies

• Reformed logistics chain and merchant relationships and self-operated portal

• Improved capability to monitor for safety and conformity

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

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

Coming in this chapter, we’re reviewing a fundamental breakdown between the costing and aptitudes of SharePoint as well as M-Files, succeeded by an in-depth analysis on their AP and purchase order digitization qualities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

While this section provides a good conventional neck-and-neck comparison, it doesn’t inform us on how these solutions manage tasks namely purchase order automation. Thus in this succeeding portion, we’re giving a summary of each tool and how it handles this important undertaking.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is one of the most widely known and endorsed enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS platforms, due to its strong association with other popular Microsoft tools like Outlook, Word, and Excel.

In the context of purchase request automation, SharePoint enables you to resolve all the issues you might be experiencing with your existing, by-hand purchase requisition arrangement.

Order Tracking

To start, by employing Microsoft SharePoint and incorporating Office 365 applications, personnel may monitor purchase requisitions at any phase from request authorizations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also empower your company to customize your electronic purchase requisition arrangement to your individual instructions and requirements.

Elements you can personalize within SharePoint include the format of the purchase requisition forms, role assignments, line items, multi-level approvals, and filters appertaining to payment terms, location, type, and more.

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 could also facilitate correspondence across sectors. Once the PO process has begun, SharePoint could prompt an automated email to all appropriate groups to alert them that the process has begun and once more as soon as it’s accomplished.

Interactive Dashboards

One more critical element of mechanization is the foresight into efficiency and workflow perceptibility. SharePoint delivers this by allowing you to oversee purchase requisition progress with an interactive dashboard.

With the dashboard framework, you could oversee purchase order history among departments, view the breakdown of approval vs denial ratio, and follow the state of existing POs.

Robust Integrations

SharePoint also provides superb adaptability in that it can work with with most solutions between departments for greater synergy.

For example, if a department presents a purchase requisition for a network printer; once the request is actioned, SharePoint can mechanically produce an entry in your finance solution for the new IT resource.

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

M-Files Overview

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

Its interface is derived from the Windows Explorer internet browser making it simple to figure out and implement for departments that are accustomed to the Windows interface.

Moreover, M-Files provides advanced functionality that enables companies to digitize workflows and processes like purchase requisition automation. Let’s examine those competencies.

Input

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

Data entry

In addition to the input capability, M-Files allows clients to distinguish and pull out information from purchase order areas to expedite the mechanization and conveying process. Additionally, M-Files permits you to input any pertinent organizational regulations, validation terms and includes archive searches to assist in ensuring veracity across the procedure.

Matching and coding

As a state-of-the-art functionality, M-Files can perform matching of POs and GL coding of non-PO invoices in your ERP operation to streamline structure and transmission.

Digitized approvals

The M-Files solution can manage and mechanize as much of the confirmation procedure as you desire. This contains handling, response, queues, routing, and aging reports. Any purchase requisition that flunks the approval course can be corrected manually and then reinstated into the digitization flow for approval.

Automatic storage of approved POs

After approval has been accepted, purchase orders can be transmitted to finance mechanically to wrap up development and storage in a main cache.

How Wave Can Aid You in Executing Your Purchase Order Automation Tool in Albuquerque

Holding your organization cutthroat these days involves streamlining your operations and uprooting the bottlenecks from your systems that mitigate your proficiency and productivity. Moreover, it involves picking the appropriate business tools to achieve your tactical growth objectives.

At Wave, we can be of assistance by studying the essential aspects of your company and through incremental digital transformation and organizational process automation, revamp them.

We utilize a blended set of innovations based on your organizational necessities to mechanize your repetitive workflows around gathering, organizing, and registering data so that it's uncomplicated to find and use whenever, from wherever.

We can assist you in customizing your AP mechanization software to satisfy your business's specific demands and we willingly go along with upwards of 60 industry-recognized ECM and DMS tools including OpenText, M-Files, SharePoint, and Oracle.

If you’d like to discover more, connect with us today and we can set up a time to chat.