SharePoint vs M-Files: The Solution For AP Proficiency & Purchase Order Automation in Columbus
Creating capabilities in your organizational operations is a pivotal opening stage toward digital transformation, back-office innovation, and granting your company an advantage in an increasingly competitive professional landscape.
Paper-based operations and incoherent workflows with impasses make synergy, efficacy, visibility, and responsibility to stakeholders notably complex.
With accounts payable digitization, you may implement dematerialized systems into your company and expedite tasks like purchase orders, payment processing, procurement, invoicing, and data entry workflows.
Mechanizing these kinds of business processes creates more capacity in enterprise resource planning (ERP), greater expenditure cuts, and enhanced utilization of your manpower.
In this manual, we’re reviewing a duo of the most popular tools used for AP proficiency and purchase requisition mechanization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our goal is to help you select the appropriate tech stack and partner so you can develop and expedite your AP digital transformation.
But before we begin with our product assessment, let’s talk through what purchase requisition automation is and how it creates further efficiency for your AP operations.
What is Purchase Order Automation?
Purchase order automation is the concept of utilizing business tools through artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotic technology to mechanize the purchase order system and its synonymous workflows.
Via digitization, purchase orders can be mechanically transmitted to the relevant team to start the validation routine. After, once the order is authorized, it is mechanically sent to the merchant.
Although this may not appear to be significant at first glance, digitizing the purchasing operation eliminates the necessity for a manual process, paper-based schemes, and expedites the usual laborious workflow.
As an example, with purchase order software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform, you can create digital purchase requisitions that vendors can identify followed by having the data mechanically incorporated into your accounting software.
This presumably minuscule capability significantly simplifies the workflow, drastically diminishes the demand for by-hand interference, and thus, enhances productivity within your Accounts Payable section.
The Perks of AP and Purchase Order Automation
We covered various of the benefits of AP digitization in the former section, but just to make sure you understand, let's dissect these advantages in absolute terms.
Automated data logging and storage
Greater efficiency through extra digitization and less human intervention
Improved accuracy because of less physical faults
Enhanced visibility into operations via digitized tasks
Actual-time auditing, reporting, and analytics to uphold the development of capacities
Reformed logistics network and vendor affinities and self-managed portal
Enhanced capability to monitor for security and amenability
So now that we’ve gone over what AP and digital purchase order is, how it works, and why it’s significant, let’s get into our platform evaluation on Sharepoint versus M-Files.
Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review
In this section, we’re examining a fundamental analysis between the pricing and competencies of SharePoint along with M-Files, and then an in-depth analysis on their AP and purchase requisition automation qualities.
Basic Price and Features Breakdown
While this portion provides a good standard neck-and-neck evaluation, it doesn’t inform us on how these programs manage workflows like electronic purchase order. So in this following chapter, we’re providing a synopsis of each program and how it manages this significant operation.
Microsoft SharePoint Overview
SharePoint is amongst the most widely known and endorsed enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS platforms, due to its deep connection with diverse popular Microsoft solutions like Word, Excel, and Outlook.
When it comes to purchase order digitization, SharePoint allows you to resolve all the problems you could be confronting with your present-day, physical purchase request arrangement.
Order Tracking
To start, by utilizing Microsoft SharePoint and incorporating Office 365 programs, team members may monitor purchase orders at every phase from request confirmations to delivery.
Customization
SharePoint and Office 365 also allow your organization to tailor your electronic purchase requisition system to your specific directions and necessities.
Aspects you can individualize within SharePoint include the template of the purchase requisition forms, role assignments, line items, multi-level approvals, and filters appertaining to type, payment terms, location, and more.
Communication
SharePoint and Office 365 may also facilitate communication across divisions. When the PO process has commenced, SharePoint may actuate an automated email to all appropriate parties to alert them that the process has commenced and once more when it’s carried out.
Interactive Dashboards
A further significant aspect of digitization is the clarity into capability and workflow perceptibility. SharePoint delivers this by authorizing you to monitor purchase request progress via an interactive dashboard.
Through the dashboard setup, you can oversee purchase requisition history throughout divisions, view the analysis of approval vs denial percentage, and follow the state of ongoing POs.
Vigorous Integrations
Moreover, SharePoint enables superb adaptability in that it can integrate with most programs across departments for increased synergy.
For example, if a department delivers a purchase request for a network printer; once the requisition is processed, SharePoint can automatically generate an entry in your finance tool for the new IT resource.
Now that we’ve learned about what SharePoint is capable of in terms of assisting you in automating your AP processes, let’s proceed to M-Files.
M-Files Overview
M-Files is a robust enterprise content management (ECM) tool that provides both local, cloud solutions, or a hybrid adaptation depending on your company demands.
Its interface is derived from the Windows Explorer web engine making it convenient to understand and execute for departments that are accustomed to the Windows operating system.
Additionally, M-Files offers innovative functionality that empowers organizations to automate operations and processes such as purchase requisition automation. Let’s examine those aptitudes.
Input
With M-Files you could gather invoices from main or allocated locations and automate the gathering of important data associated with your purchase order and confirmation undertaking.
Data entry
As an extension of the input competence, M-Files enables customers to distinguish and pull out information from purchase request fields to promote the automation and transmission process. Moreover, M-Files allows you to input any pertinent business rules, approval specifications and includes archive lookups to assist in guaranteeing veracity during the operation.
Matching and coding
As a state-of-the-art functional scope, M-Files can execute matching of POs and GL coding of non-PO billing statements in your ERP system to streamline arrangement and transmission.
Automated approvals
The M-Files solution can control and digitize as much of the approval workflow as you desire. This includes overseeing, queues, routing, response, and aging records. Any purchase requisition that falls short of the authorization course can be amended by hand and then put back into the mechanization flow for validation.
Automatic storage of approved POs
Once approval has been granted, purchase requisitions can be sent to finance mechanically to conclude processing and storage in a central database.
How Wave Can Help You Implement Your Purchase Order Automation Solution in Columbus
Holding your organization competitive these days requires streamlining your operations and removing the bottlenecks from your undertakings that mitigate your proficiency and productivity. Moreover, it involves picking the right business solutions to complete your calculated growth objectives.
At Wave, we can be of assistance by studying the foundational elements of your company and with incremental digital conversion and business system automation, reform them.
We use a consolidation of technology based on your business needs to automate your laborious workflows around collecting, organizing, and cataloging data so that it's easy to track down and use whenever, from any location.
We can be of assistance in individualizing your AP digitization solution to satisfy your business's precise demands and we willingly collaborate with over 60 industry-accepted ECM and DMS tools including M-Files, SharePoint, OpenText, and Oracle.
If you’re ready to learn more, connect with us today and we can set up a time to chat.