SharePoint vs M-Files: The Platform For AP Efficiency & Purchase Order Automation in Fort Worth

Creating efficiencies in your business processes is a pivotal opening step toward digital transformation, back-office innovation, and supplying your business an advantage in an increasingly competitive professional industry.

Tangible arrangements and incoherent systems with impasses make collaboration, efficiency, perceptibility, and responsibility to stakeholders quite difficult.

With accounts payable mechanization, you can achieve cloud-based systems into your company and expedite workflows like purchase requisitions, procurement, invoicing, payment processing, and data input processes.

Digitizing these kinds of company operations produces more proficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), higher expenditure cuts, and reformed employment of your human resources.

Within this guide, we’re examining two of the most famous tools designed for AP productivity and purchase request automation: SharePoint and M-Files. Our goal is to assist you in selecting the appropriate toolset and collaborate so you can augment and expedite your AP digital revamping.

But before we begin with our product assessment, let’s discuss what purchase requisition automation is and how it generates higher capability for your AP operations.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the notion of using business solutions through machine learning (ML), robotic technology, and artificial intelligence (AI) to digitize the purchase requisition process and its related workflows.

By means of automation, purchase requisitions may be automatically sent to the relevant team to start the validation procedure. After, as soon as the requisition is confirmed, it is automatically sent to the supplier.

Though this may not seem like much at first read, digitizing the buying operation removes the requirement for a manual process, tangible systems, and expedites the often laborious workflow.

For example, with purchase request software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool, you can create electronic purchase requests that vendors can acknowledge and then have the data mechanically integrated into your accounting platform.

This superficially small ability greatly simplifies the process, drastically lessens the requirement for manual intervention, and therefore, enhances efficiency inside your Accounts Payable division.

The Benefits of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We talked about various of the benefits of AP digitization in the previous section, but just to make sure you get the idea, let's break these benefits down in absolute terms.

• Mechanized data logging and storage

• Greater competence via extra digitization and less manual intervention

• Greater precision because of less physical blunders

• Increased perceptibility into systems via mechanized tasks

• Current-time analytics, auditing, and reporting to sustain the betterment of efficiencies

• Reformed distribution network and vendor relationships and self-operated portal

• Enhanced ability to oversee for protection and amenability

Now that we’ve reviewed what AP and electronic purchase order is, how it functions, and why it’s important, let’s start our software review on Sharepoint as opposed to M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

Within this section, we’re going to first take a look at a straightforward breakdown between the pricing and aptitudes of SharePoint along with M-Files, succeeded by an extensive review on their AP and purchase order mechanization qualities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

While this portion gives a decent conventional side-by-side comparison, it doesn’t educate us on how these programs handle processes namely purchase order automation. Therefore in this following section, we’re going to do an overview of each solution and how it administers this significant operation.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is amongst the most widely known and endorsed enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS tools, because of its strong association with different famed Microsoft tools like Word, Excel, and Outlook.

As it relates to purchase request automation, SharePoint allows you to address each one of the problems you could be experiencing with your present-day, physical purchase order scheme.

Order Tracking

To start, by utilizing Microsoft SharePoint and combining Office 365 applications, staff may monitor purchase requisitions at any stage from request approvals to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also enable your company to adapt your electronic purchase request system to your particular instructions and needs.

Aspects you could custom tailor within SharePoint involve the layout of the purchase order forms, multi-level approvals, role assignments, line items, and filters appertaining to type, payment terms, location, and more.

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 could also further connection across departments. When the PO operation has started, SharePoint can prompt a mechanized email to all relevant teams to alert them that the operation has commenced and once more when it’s complete.

Interactive Dashboards

Another important aspect of mechanization is the foresight into productivity and workflow perceptibility. SharePoint delivers this by permitting you to monitor purchase requisition progress via an interactive dashboard.

Through the dashboard setup, you can oversee purchase requisition history across divisions, see the evaluation of approval vs denial percentage, and follow the state of existing POs.

Powerful Integrations

SharePoint also enables great flexibility in that it can work with with most solutions among departments for improved synergy.

For instance, if a department delivers a purchase order for a network printer; when the requisition is processed, SharePoint can spontaneously produce an entry in your finance software for the new IT asset.

Now that we’ve learned about what SharePoint can accomplish in terms of aiding you in digitizing your AP workflows, let’s move on to M-Files.

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a powerful enterprise content management (ECM) solution that offers both local, cloud solutions, or a hybrid adaptation contingent on your business needs.

Its interface is modeled off the Windows Explorer web browser making it easy to learn and execute for parties that are accustomed to the Windows ecosystem.

Furthermore, M-Files grants state-of-the-art functionality that allows businesses to automate tasks and processes like purchase requisition automation. Let’s take a look at those competencies.

Input

With M-Files you may capture invoices from main or distributed areas and mechanize the gathering of significant data associated with your purchase request and approval undertaking.

Data entry

As a continuation of the input competence, M-Files enables customers to pinpoint and withdraw details from purchase request fields to promote the mechanization and conveying process. Moreover, M-Files enables you to input any pertinent company rules, confirmation specifications and includes archive searches to assist in ensuring accuracy across the procedure.

Matching and coding

As an advanced functionality, M-Files could carry out conforming of POs and GL coding of non-PO statements in your ERP system to simplify organization and routing.

Automated approvals

The M-Files solution can control and automate as much of the confirmation procedure as you wish. This contains handling, queues, routing, response, and aging records. Any purchase requisition that fails the validation procedure can be corrected physically and then restored into the digitization flow for approval.

Automatic storage of approved POs

After approval has been granted, purchase requisitions can be forwarded to finance spontaneously to finalize development and storage in a primary database.

How Wave Can Aid You in Executing Your Purchase Order Automation Solution in Fort Worth

Keeping your business fierce today requires rationalizing your processes and eliminating the hindrances from your workflows that work to diminish your efficiency and output. It also involves choosing the proper business systems to complete your strategic growth goals.

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

We use a consolidation of technology based on your company needs to digitize your tedious tasks around collecting, arranging, and cataloging data so that it's easy to track down and use whenever, from any location.

We can assist you in customizing your AP mechanization tool to fulfill your business's specific demands and we gladly work with more than 60 industry-acknowledged ECM and DMS tools including SharePoint, OpenText, M-Files, and Oracle.

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