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

Developing capabilities in your company processes is a pivotal opening stage toward digital transformation, back-office upgrading, and giving your company an edge in an increasingly competitive professional landscape.

Concrete arrangements and fragmented workflows with bottlenecks make collaboration, productivity, visibility, and accountability to stakeholders very difficult.

Through accounts payable mechanization, you can implement cloud-based arrangements into your company and simplify workflows like purchase requests, invoicing, payment processing, procurement, and data input tasks.

Digitizing these types of company operations generates more proficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), better cost savings, and reformed utilization of your manpower.

Included in this guide, we’re examining two of the most popular tools geared toward AP proficiency and purchase order automation: SharePoint and M-Files. Our goal is to help you select the proper tech stack and partner so you can augment and expedite your AP digital revamping.

But before we begin with our product analysis, let’s discuss what purchase request digitization is and how it produces further capability for your AP operations.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the concept of using business solutions through artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotic technology to automate the purchase requisition system and its corresponding tasks.

By means of mechanization, purchase requests can be mechanically transmitted to the fitting company to initiate the approval routine. Then, as soon as the request is approved, it is automatically transmitted to the vendor.

Although this may not seem like much at first read, automating the purchasing process removes the requirement for a by-hand process, paper-based schemes, and simplifies the often time-consuming workflow.

For example, with purchase requisition software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool, you can create digital purchase orders that suppliers can comprehend followed by having the details mechanically integrated into your accounting tool.

This seemingly minor ability greatly expedites the system, drastically reduces the demand for human interference, and consequently, enhances proficiency inside your Accounts Payable section.

The Advantages of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We talked about various of the advantages of AP automation in the former section, but to guarantee that you get the idea, let's dissect these advantages in absolute terms.

• Digitized data logging and storage

• Greater competence via extra automation and less manual interference

• Enhanced reliability due to less physical error

• Increased transparency into systems with your mechanized workflows

• Current-time analytics, auditing, and reporting to uphold the development of capacities

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

• Greater ability to regulate for security and amenability

So now that we’ve gone over what AP and purchase order automation is, how it operates, and why it’s important, let’s begin our platform evaluation on Sharepoint versus M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

Within this portion, we’re reviewing a basic analysis between the costing and competencies of SharePoint along with M-Files, and then a deeper dive on their AP and purchase order automation capabilities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

Though this chapter gives a decent standard side-by-side analogy, it doesn’t educate us on how these tools handle workflows namely purchase order automation. Thus in this following portion, we’re giving a synopsis of each solution and how it administers this significant task.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is one of the most prominent and endorsed enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS platforms, owing to its deep connection with diverse prevalent Microsoft tools like Excel, Outlook, and Word.

When it comes to purchase request digitization, SharePoint allows you to resolve the entirety of issues you may be facing with your existing, manual purchase requisition system.

Order Tracking

To initiate, by utilizing Microsoft SharePoint and integrating Office 365 programs, team members can oversee purchase requests at any level from request authorizations to delivery.

Customization

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

Aspects you may custom tailor within SharePoint comprise of the format of the purchase requisition forms, line items, multi-level approvals, role assignments, and filters appertaining to location, type, payment terms, and more.

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 could also further correspondence across divisions. Once the PO operation has started, SharePoint may actuate a mechanized email to all respective teams to inform them that the process has begun and once more as soon as it’s accomplished.

Interactive Dashboards

A further critical aspect of automation is the clarity into capability and workflow visibility. SharePoint enables this by allowing you to oversee purchase order progress through an interactive dashboard.

Via the dashboard framework, you can monitor purchase requisition history across divisions, see the evaluation of approval vs denial proportion, and follow the position of POs in progress.

Powerful Integrations

SharePoint also offers great flexibility in that it can integrate with most solutions across departments for improved cooperation.

For example, if a branch delivers a purchase order for a network printer; once the order is handled, SharePoint can mechanically develop an entry in your finance software for the new IT resource.

Now that we’ve learned about what SharePoint is capable of in terms of helping you automate your AP processes, let’s proceed to M-Files.

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a powerful enterprise content management (ECM) tool that offers both on-premise, cloud solutions, or a hybrid variant determined by your organizational demands.

Its interface is based off of the Windows Explorer web browser making it convenient to figure out and perform for teams that are used to the Windows interface.

Additionally, M-Files offers advanced functionality that allows companies to mechanize operations and processes like purchase request automation. Let’s examine those aptitudes.

Input

With M-Files you may acquire invoices from central or allocated areas and automate the gathering of significant data related to your purchase request and approval workflows.

Data entry

As a continuation of the input competence, M-Files allows clients to distinguish and withdraw information from purchase requisition domains to expedite the digitization and routing process. Additionally, M-Files allows you to input any pertinent business codes, approval terms and incorporates database searches to help ensure veracity throughout the process.

Matching and coding

As an advanced feature-set, M-Files can perform corresponding of POs and GL coding of non-PO invoices in your ERP system to streamline organization and delivery.

Automated approvals

The M-Files system can regulate and automate as much of the approval workflow as you wish. This includes managing, response, queues, routing, and aging reports. Any purchase requisition that fails the validation process can be corrected manually and then reinstated into the digitization flow for approval.

Automatic storage of approved POs

Once approval has been issued, purchase requisitions can be transmitted to finance spontaneously to wrap up handling and storage in a central repository.

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

Keeping your company cutthroat today requires simplifying your operations and eliminating the impasses from your workflows that decrease your capability and output. Additionally, it involves picking the proper business tools to complete your tactical growth aims.

At Wave, we can help by examining the essential pieces of your business and with step-by-step digital conversion and company process automation, transform them.

We apply a blended set of solutions based on your company necessities to mechanize your tedious processes around gathering, arranging, and registering data so that it's simple to find and access whenever, from any location.

We can help you to custom-tailor your AP mechanization tool to satisfy your business's particular needs and we willingly collaborate with more than 60 industry-recognized ECM and DMS platforms including M-Files, SharePoint, OpenText, and Oracle.

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