SharePoint vs M-Files: The Tool For AP Proficiency & Purchase Order Automation in Boston
Developing efficiencies in your business workflows is a pivotal first step toward digital transformation, back-office modernization, and granting your business an advantage in a progressively aggressive professional industry.
Tangible operations and incoherent systems with impasses make synergy, efficacy, visibility, and responsibility to shareholders very complex.
By means of accounts payable digitization, you may implement dematerialized operations into your business and expedite workflows like purchase orders, invoicing, payment processing, procurement, and data logging workflows.
Automating these kinds of company workflows produces more efficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), higher cost savings, and enhanced utilization of your personnel.
In this guide, we’re reviewing a duo of the most famous tools used for AP efficiency and purchase request automation: SharePoint and M-Files. Our goal is to assist you in selecting the appropriate toolset and collaborate so you may augment and speed up your AP digital transformation.
But prior to starting our product assessment, let’s talk through what purchase requisition automation is and how it creates higher productivity for your AP workflows.
What is Purchase Order Automation?
Purchase order automation is the process of employing business tools via machine learning (ML), robotic technology, and artificial intelligence (AI) to mechanize the purchase requisition operation and its related undertakings.
By means of automation, purchase requisitions may be automatically forwarded to the appropriate party to initiate the validation routine. Then, as soon as the order is confirmed, it is mechanically forwarded to the vendor.
Although this may not appear to be significant at first glance, mechanizing the purchasing operation eliminates the requirement for a physical process, tangible schemes, and simplifies the usual labor-intensive workflow.
For example, with purchase requisition software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform, you can produce automated purchase requisitions that suppliers can comprehend and then have the information mechanically fused into your accounting tool.
This superficially small aptitude greatly simplifies the system, drastically diminishes the demand for human intervention, and thus, amplifies productivity within your Accounts Payable department.
The Perks of AP and Purchase Order Automation
We talked about various of the benefits of AP digitization in the former section, but to be certain that you understand, let's break these benefits down in absolute terms.
Automated data logging and storage
Improved productivity with more mechanization and less human meddling
Greater precision due to less human blunders
Greater perceptibility into procedures with your mechanized workflows
Current-time auditing, reporting, and analytics to sustain the betterment of performances
Reformed logistics chain and supplier relationships and self-managed portal
Greater aptitude to monitor for safety and amenability
Since we’ve discussed what AP and electronic purchase order is, how it functions, and why it’s vital, let’s start our product evaluation on Sharepoint versus M-Files.
Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review
Within this section, we’re examining a basic breakdown between the pricing and aptitudes of SharePoint and M-Files, succeeded by a deeper dive on their AP and purchase requisition automation potential.
Basic Price and Features Breakdown
Although this section gives a fine standard simultaneous comparison, it doesn’t educate us on how these solutions manage processes like digital purchase order. Therefore in this succeeding chapter, we’re going to do an overview of each solution and how it manages this important task.
Microsoft SharePoint Overview
SharePoint is one of the most prominent and established enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS tools, because of its deep connection with diverse famed Microsoft programs like Word, Excel, and Outlook.
As it relates to purchase order digitization, SharePoint allows you to handle all the problems you might be experiencing with your existing, manual purchase requisition system.
Order Tracking
To initiate, by using Microsoft SharePoint and incorporating Office 365 tools, team members may track purchase requisitions at every level from request authorizations to delivery.
Customization
SharePoint and Office 365 also empower your organization to tailor your digital purchase order system to your particular instructions and requirements.
Components you may custom tailor within SharePoint involve the layout of the purchase request forms, role assignments, line items, multi-level approvals, and filters attributed to type, payment terms, location, and more.
Communication
SharePoint and Office 365 could also promote correspondence among sectors. Once the PO procedure has commenced, SharePoint could actuate an automated email to all relevant teams to alert them that the operation has commenced and once more as soon as it’s accomplished.
Interactive Dashboards
Another critical element of mechanization is the clarity into efficiency and workflow visibility. SharePoint delivers this by permitting you to oversee purchase order progress through an interactive dashboard.
Through the dashboard framework, you may monitor purchase order history across divisions, view the breakdown of approval vs denial percentage, and follow the position of POs in progress.
Vigorous Integrations
Moreover, SharePoint provides great adaptability in that it can incorporate with most tools between departments for greater collaboration.
For example, if a department presents a purchase order for a network printer; once the order is processed, SharePoint can spontaneously develop an entry in your finance tool for the new IT asset.
Now that we’ve seen what SharePoint can do in terms of aiding you in digitizing your AP tasks, let’s move on to M-Files.
M-Files Overview
M-Files is a powerful enterprise content management (ECM) tool that provides both on-site, cloud solutions, or a hybrid adaptation contingent on your organizational needs.
Its interface is based off of the Windows Explorer internet browser making it convenient to learn and implement for teams that are accustomed to the Windows interface.
Additionally, M-Files offers innovative functionality that empowers companies to mechanize tasks and processes like purchase requisition automation. Let’s study those aptitudes.
Input
With M-Files you may gather invoices from central or distributed sites and mechanize the ingestion of important data related to your purchase order and confirmation workflows.
Data entry
As a continuation of the input competence, M-Files empowers clients to pinpoint and withdraw data from purchase order fields to promote the digitization and routing process. Furthermore, M-Files permits you to input any appropriate business regulations, validation specifications and incorporates database lookups to help ensure accuracy throughout the operation.
Matching and coding
As a state-of-the-art functionality, M-Files may carry out corresponding of POs and GL coding of non-PO invoices in your ERP procedure to facilitate arrangement and routing.
Mechanized approvals
The M-Files solution can regulate and digitize as much of the confirmation workflow as you want. This includes overseeing, queues, routing, response, and aging accounts. Any purchase order that fails the authorization process can be corrected by hand and then reinstated into the digitization flow for approval.
Automatic storage of approved POs
After authorization has been accepted, purchase requests can be forwarded to finance mechanically to wrap up processing and storage in a central cache.
How Wave Can Help You Implement Your Purchase Order Automation Platform in Boston
Keeping your company cutthroat today requires streamlining your procedures and eliminating the hindrances from your undertakings that decrease your capability and efficacy. Additionally, it means picking the right business solutions to achieve your strategic growth objectives.
At Wave, we can be of assistance by analyzing the essential elements of your business and via incremental digital transformation and organizational workflow automation, transform them.
We apply a blended set of technology in accordance with your business necessities to automate your laborious processes around capturing, organizing, and filing data so that it's simple to track down and use whenever, from wherever.
We can be of assistance in individualizing your AP digitization solution to fulfill your company’s specific requirements and we happily work with more than 60 industry-acknowledged ECM and DMS tools including M-Files, SharePoint, OpenText, and Oracle.
If you’d like to discover more, reach out today and we can arrange a time to chat.