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

Creating capabilities in your business processes is a pivotal opening stage toward digital switch-over, back-office upgrading, and giving your organization an edge in a growingly aggressive professional industry.

Tangible systems and disjointed processes with bottlenecks make collaboration, efficiency, transparency, and accountability to stakeholders very difficult.

Through accounts payable digitization, you may implement dematerialized systems into your organization and expedite tasks like purchase requisitions, procurement, invoicing, payment processing, and data logging workflows.

Mechanizing these kinds of business operations produces more capacity in enterprise resource planning (ERP), greater cost savings, and reformed utilization of your personnel.

Within this guide, we’re examining two of the most famous platforms geared toward AP proficiency and purchase order digitization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our target is to assist you in selecting the appropriate toolset and collaborate so you can develop and accelerate your AP digital revamping.

But prior to beginning our product review, let’s talk through what purchase request mechanization is and how it generates higher capability for your AP processes.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the notion of using business solutions with robotic technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to mechanize the purchase requisition process and its corresponding tasks.

Via automation, purchase requisitions may be mechanically transmitted to the appropriate company to start the approval routine. Later, as soon as the request is approved, it is instinctively forwarded to the vendor.

Although this may not seem like much at first read, digitizing the buying procedure abolishes the necessity for a by-hand process, materialized schemes, and streamlines the standard time-consuming workflow.

As an example, with purchase order software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform, you can create electronic purchase orders that contractors can comprehend at which point the information automatically fused into your accounting platform.

This presumably minuscule aptitude greatly expedites the workflow, drastically reduces the requirement for manual meddling, and thus, amplifies proficiency within your Accounts Payable department.

The Benefits of AP and Purchase Order Automation

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

• Automated data entry and storage

• Greater competence with more digitization and less human intervention

• Enhanced precision because of less human error

• Greater transparency into systems via automated processes

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

• Reformed distribution process and vendor relationships and self-managed portal

• Greater capability to monitor for protection and conformity

Now that we’ve reviewed what AP and purchase order automation is, how it operates, and why it’s significant, let’s begin our software assessment on Sharepoint as opposed to M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

In this portion, we’re going to first take a look at a straightforward evaluation between the costing and competencies of SharePoint as well as M-Files, and then an in-depth analysis on their AP and purchase requisition automation potential.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

Though this portion gives a fine general simultaneous comparison, it doesn’t educate us on how these tools manage tasks like purchase order automation. So in this next chapter, we’re providing a summary of each program and how it manages this important task.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is amongst the most prominent and established enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS tools, due to its close relation to diverse famed Microsoft programs like Outlook, Word, and Excel.

When it comes to purchase request automation, SharePoint enables you to address each one of the concerns you might be confronting with your current, manual purchase order arrangement.

Order Tracking

To begin, by employing Microsoft SharePoint and integrating Office 365 tools, personnel could oversee purchase orders at all stage from request authorizations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also allow your organization to tailor your automated purchase order system to your individual guidelines and necessities.

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

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 may also further communication across departments. As soon as the PO operation has begun, SharePoint may prompt an automated email to all relevant teams to inform them that the procedure has begun and once more as soon as it’s carried out.

Interactive Dashboards

A further important component of mechanization is the foresight into productivity and workflow transparency. SharePoint delivers this by authorizing you to monitor purchase requisition progress through an interactive dashboard.

With the dashboard setup, you may track purchase order history throughout departments, see the evaluation of approval vs denial percentage, and follow the status of existing POs.

Powerful Integrations

Furthermore, SharePoint provides superb adaptability in that it can work with with most tools across departments for improved synergy.

Such as, if a branch delivers a purchase requisition for a network printer; as soon as the requisition is actioned, SharePoint can automatically produce an entry in your finance solution for the new IT asset.

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

M-Files Overview

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

Its interface is derived from the Windows Explorer internet browser making it convenient to learn and perform for teams that are comfortable with the Windows interface.

Furthermore, M-Files grants state-of-the-art functionality that allows businesses to mechanize tasks and processes such as purchase request automation. Let’s study those aptitudes.

Input

With M-Files you can acquire invoices from primary or assigned sites and digitize the gathering of essential data associated with your purchase request and approval workflows.

Data entry

As a continuation of the input aptitude, M-Files enables users to identify and withdraw information from purchase order domains to facilitate the automation and transmission process. Moreover, M-Files allows you to input any relevant company rules, validation terms and contains database lookups to assist in guaranteeing veracity during the procedure.

Matching and coding

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

Digitized approvals

The M-Files system can manage and mechanize as much of the approval process as you wish. This includes handling, response, queues, routing, and aging reports. Any purchase requisition that fails the authorization process can be amended by hand and then put back into the digitization flow for validation.

Automatic storage of approved POs

As soon as validation has been accepted, purchase requests can be forwarded to finance automatically to conclude handling and storage in a central database.

How Wave Can Aid You in Executing Your Purchase Order Automation Tool in Jacksonville

Holding your company cutthroat today means rationalizing your processes and uprooting the hindrances from your undertakings that decrease your efficiency and efficacy. Additionally, it involves selecting the proper business solutions to accomplish your calculated growth aims.

At Wave, we can assist by examining the foundational elements of your business and through step-by-step digital conversion and organizational system automation, transform them.

We utilize a combination of innovations based on your company necessities to automate your tedious workflows around collecting, organizing, and registering data so that it's uncomplicated to locate and utilize at any time, from anywhere.

We can assist you in customizing your AP automation software to satisfy your organization’s particular demands and we gladly go along with more than 60 industry-recognized ECM and DMS solutions including M-Files, SharePoint, OpenText, and Oracle.

If you’d like to discover more, connect with us today and we can set up a time to chat.