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

Generating competencies in your company workflows is a crucial first step toward digital switch-over, back-office upgrading, and granting your business an edge in a progressively aggressive professional industry.

Concrete systems and disjointed workflows with impasses make cooperation, efficacy, transparency, and accountability to partners notably complex.

By means of accounts payable digitization, you can achieve paperless arrangements into your company and streamline workflows like purchase requests, procurement, invoicing, payment processing, and data input tasks.

Automating these types of organizational workflows produces more capacity in enterprise resource planning (ERP), greater cost savings, and reformed utilization of your manpower.

In this guide, we’re reviewing a couple of the most prevalent tools designed for AP proficiency and purchase requisition digitization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our target is to help you select the proper tech stack and partner so you may develop and accelerate your AP digital transformation.

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

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the concept of using business tools with artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotic technology to mechanize the purchase request process and its synonymous tasks.

Via digitization, purchase requisitions can be mechanically forwarded to the appropriate team to start the validation routine. After, as soon as the requisition is confirmed, it is instinctively forwarded to the merchant.

While this may not seem like much at first read, mechanizing the buying procedure eliminates the need for a physical process, paper-based arrangements, and simplifies the often time-consuming workflow.

For example, with purchase requisition software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool, you can develop electronic purchase requests that suppliers can acknowledge followed by having the information mechanically incorporated into your accounting software.

This presumably minor ability substantially streamlines the workflow, drastically diminishes the need for by-hand intervention, and thus, amplifies efficiency inside your Accounts Payable division.

The Advantages of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We discussed several of the gains of AP digitization in the former chapter, but just to make sure you understand, let's take these advantages apart in the simplest terms.

• Automated data entry and storage

• Enhanced efficiency via further automation and less human intervention

• Enhanced reliability due to less human blunders

• Enhanced visibility into procedures through your mechanized workflows

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

• Improved distribution process and supplier relationships and self-managed portal

• Enhanced capability to oversee for safety and compliance

Now that we’ve reviewed what AP and digital purchase order is, how it works, and why it’s significant, let’s start our product assessment on Sharepoint vs M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

Coming in this section, we’re reviewing a basic breakdown between the costing and competencies of SharePoint and M-Files, succeeded by a deeper dive on their AP and purchase request mechanization potential.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

Though this chapter gives a good conventional side-by-side analogy, it doesn’t tell us much about how these programs administer workflows like digital purchase order. Thus in this next chapter, we’re providing an overview of each solution and how it manages this important undertaking.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is one of the more recognized and accepted enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS platforms, because of its close relation to different prevalent Microsoft tools like Outlook, Word, and Excel.

When it comes to purchase order automation, SharePoint allows you to resolve the entirety of problems you might be confronting with your current, by-hand purchase order arrangement.

Order Tracking

To initiate, by employing Microsoft SharePoint and integrating Office 365 programs, team members could monitor purchase requisitions at all phase from request confirmations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also allow your organization to tailor your electronic purchase request scheme to your specific directions and requirements.

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

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 may also promote connection across sectors. When the PO procedure has begun, SharePoint could trigger a programmed email to all appropriate teams to notify them that the procedure has begun and again once it’s accomplished.

Interactive Dashboards

Another important element of automation is the clarity into capability and workflow visibility. SharePoint enables this by authorizing you to oversee purchase order progress through an interactive dashboard.

Through the dashboard setup, you could oversee purchase request history throughout divisions, see the breakdown of approval vs denial percentage, and monitor the position of ongoing POs.

Powerful Integrations

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

Such as, if a branch submits a purchase request for a network printer; as soon as the request is actioned, SharePoint can spontaneously generate an entry in your finance solution for the new IT asset.

Now that we’ve seen what SharePoint is capable of in terms of aiding you in digitizing your AP processes, let’s move on to M-Files.

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a robust enterprise content management (ECM) solution that presents both on-premise, cloud solutions, or a hybrid adaptation depending on your organizational requirements.

Its interface is modeled off the Windows Explorer internet browser making it convenient to understand and perform for parties that are accustomed to the Windows operating system.

Furthermore, M-Files offers innovative functionality that empowers organizations to mechanize workflows and processes like purchase requisition automation. Let’s study those capabilities.

Input

With M-Files you could gather invoices from central or distributed locations and automate the ingestion of essential data related to your purchase order and confirmation undertaking.

Data entry

In addition to the input aptitude, M-Files allows customers to identify and pull out details from purchase order fields to expedite the automation and transmission process. Moreover, M-Files allows you to input any pertinent organizational regulations, confirmation details and includes directory searches to assist in ensuring accuracy across the process.

Matching and coding

As an advanced feature-set, M-Files can execute corresponding of POs and GL coding of non-PO statements in your ERP system to facilitate arrangement and routing.

Digitized approvals

The M-Files platform can regulate and digitize as much of the authorization process as you wish. This involves managing, routing, response, queues, and aging records. Any purchase order that falls short of the validation procedure can be corrected physically and then reinstated into the mechanization flow for approval.

Automatic storage of approved POs

As soon as authorization has been granted, purchase requisitions can be forwarded to finance mechanically to finalize handling and storage in a central repository.

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

Holding your company cutthroat nowadays involves streamlining your processes and removing the impasses from your workflows that work to diminish your capability and output. Moreover, it means selecting the proper business systems to accomplish your tactical growth aims.

At Wave, we can help by studying the foundational elements of your business and through gradual digital conversion and business system automation, reform them.

We apply a blended set of innovations in accordance with your company requirements to automate your laborious workflows around capturing, organizing, and filing data so that it's uncomplicated to find and use whenever, from any location.

We can be of assistance in individualizing your AP digitization software to satisfy your organization’s particular requirements and we happily work with more than 60 industry-accepted ECM and DMS tools 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.