SharePoint vs M-Files: The Tool For AP Proficiency & Purchase Order Automation in Aurora

Developing efficiencies in your organizational workflows is a crucial initial phase toward digital conversion, back-office upgrading, and giving your company an advantage in a progressively cutthroat professional sector.

Paper-based operations and incoherent systems with impasses make collaboration, efficacy, perceptibility, and accountability to shareholders very complex.

Through accounts payable automation, you may achieve paperless systems into your business and simplify duties like purchase orders, payment processing, procurement, invoicing, and data entry workflows.

Digitizing these forms of organizational processes creates more proficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), greater expenditure cuts, and improved utilization of your personnel.

Within this handbook, we’re reviewing a couple of the most famous platforms designed for AP proficiency and purchase requisition digitization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our goal is to aid you in selecting the appropriate tech stack and cooperate so you may augment and accelerate your AP digital transformation.

But prior to starting our product assessment, let’s do a quick review of what purchase request digitization is and how it creates greater efficiency for your AP workflows.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

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

Through automation, purchase requisitions could be mechanically forwarded to the fitting party to start the validation procedure. Later, as soon as the request is authorized, it is automatically forwarded to the vendor.

Though this may not seem like much at first read, automating the buying procedure eliminates the necessity for a manual process, tangible systems, and expedites the usual laborious workflow.

For example, with purchase order solution or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, you can create digital purchase requests that suppliers can acknowledge and then have the data mechanically incorporated into your accounting software.

This presumably small aptitude greatly simplifies the process, remarkably lessens the requirement for manual interference, and thus, amplifies efficiency inside your Accounts Payable department.

The Benefits of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We discussed a number of the advantages of AP mechanization in the previous section, but to guarantee that you get the idea, let's dissect these advantages in plain language.

• Automated data entry and storage

• Improved productivity through more mechanization and less by-hand interference

• Improved reliability on account of less physical error

• Greater visibility into procedures via digitized tasks

• Real-time analytics, auditing, and reporting to sustain the betterment of capacities

• Enhanced supply network and vendor relationships and self-managed portal

• Improved aptitude to monitor for safety and conformity

So now that we’ve discussed what AP and electronic purchase order is, how it functions, and why it’s significant, let’s get into our product evaluation on Sharepoint vs M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

Within this chapter, we’re going to first take a look at a fundamental breakdown between the rate and capabilities of SharePoint and M-Files, followed by a deeper dive on their AP and purchase order mechanization capabilities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

While this chapter provides a fine general side-by-side comparison, it doesn’t tell us much about how these programs handle processes like purchase order automation. Therefore in this following portion, we’re going to do a synopsis of each solution and how it handles this significant task.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

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

As it relates to purchase request digitization, SharePoint sanctions you to resolve all the concerns you might be experiencing with your existing, by-hand purchase request system.

Order Tracking

To initiate, by using Microsoft SharePoint and combining Office 365 programs, staff could track purchase orders at all stage from request confirmations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also enable your company to customize your digital purchase request scheme to your particular instructions and requirements.

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

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 may also facilitate communication between departments. Once the PO operation has begun, SharePoint could prompt an automated email to all appropriate groups to inform them that the process has commenced and once more when it’s carried out.

Interactive Dashboards

One more critical component of mechanization is the insight into efficiency and workflow visibility. SharePoint provides this by allowing you to monitor purchase requisition progress with an interactive dashboard.

Through the dashboard framework, you can track purchase request history throughout divisions, distinguish the evaluation of approval vs denial percentage, and monitor the status of ongoing POs.

Vigorous Integrations

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

For instance, if a branch presents a purchase request for a network printer; once the request is handled, SharePoint can spontaneously produce an entry in your finance tool for the new IT asset.

Now that we’ve seen 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 presents both local, cloud solutions, or a hybrid adaptation determined by your organizational demands.

Its interface is modeled off the Windows Explorer web browser making it easy to figure out and execute for teams that are used to the Windows interface.

Additionally, M-Files offers state-of-the-art functionality that allows organizations to automate tasks and processes like purchase request automation. Let’s take a look at those competencies.

Input

With M-Files you could capture invoices from primary or allocated locations and mechanize the collection of essential data related to your purchase request and authorization workflows.

Data entry

As an extension of the input aptitude, M-Files empowers customers to pinpoint and withdraw data from purchase request domains to expedite the digitization and routing process. Moreover, M-Files allows you to input any appropriate business regulations, confirmation details and includes archive lookups to help ensure precision across the procedure.

Matching and coding

As an advanced feature-set, M-Files may carry out corresponding of POs and GL coding of non-PO invoices in your ERP procedure to simplify organization and delivery.

Digitized approvals

The M-Files system can control and automate as much of the authorization procedure as you desire. This involves handling, response, queues, routing, and aging accounts. Any purchase requisition that fails the validation course can be revised by hand and then restored into the automation flow for authorization.

Automatic storage of approved POs

As soon as authorization has been issued, purchase requisitions can be sent to finance automatically to conclude processing and storage in a central repository.

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

Keeping your company competitive today requires streamlining your operations and eliminating the impasses from your undertakings that work to diminish your proficiency and output. Additionally, it means choosing the proper business tools to achieve your calculated growth aims.

At Wave, we can be of assistance by examining the fundamental aspects of your company and via incremental digital switch-over and company system automation, revamp them.

We use a combination of technology based on your company requirements to automate your laborious tasks around collecting, regulating, and filing data so that it's easy to locate and use whenever, from wherever.

We can assist you in customizing your AP mechanization tool to satisfy your business's precise requirements and we willingly work with more than 60 industry-accepted ECM and DMS solutions including SharePoint, OpenText, M-Files, and Oracle.

If you’d like to discover more, reach out today and we can schedule a time to chat.