SharePoint vs M-Files: The Platform For AP Proficiency & Purchase Order Automation in Newark

Generating competencies in your business processes is a pivotal first phase toward digital conversion, back-office upgrading, and supplying your company an edge in an increasingly cutthroat professional landscape.

Paper-based systems and disjointed processes with logjams make collaboration, productivity, visibility, and responsibility to partners very difficult.

With accounts payable digitization, you may carry out cloud-based arrangements into your organization and simplify duties like purchase requests, procurement, invoicing, payment processing, and data entry tasks.

Mechanizing these kinds of business workflows produces more efficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), greater expenditure cuts, and reformed employment of your manpower.

In this handbook, we’re examining a duo of the most popular tools designed for AP efficiency and purchase order mechanization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our goal is to assist you in selecting the right solutions stack and partner so you can augment and speed up your AP digital switch-over.

But before we begin with our product review, let’s talk through what purchase requisition mechanization is and how it creates higher productivity for your AP operations.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the concept of using business tools through artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotic technology to automate the purchase order operation and its related undertakings.

By means of mechanization, purchase orders can be automatically transmitted to the relevant team to initiate the validation procedure. Then, once the requisition is confirmed, it is instinctively sent to the vendor.

Although this may not look like much at first glance, mechanizing the purchasing process removes the requirement for a manual process, tangible systems, and streamlines the often time-consuming workflow.

For instance, with purchase order software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool, you can produce automated purchase requests that contractors can acknowledge followed by having the data automatically incorporated into your accounting software.

This superficially minor ability substantially streamlines the workflow, dramatically lessens the need for manual intervention, and consequently, enhances efficiency within your Accounts Payable division.

The Advantages of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We discussed various of the gains of AP automation in the preceding section, but to be certain that you understand, let's take these advantages apart in absolute terms.

• Digitized data input and storage

• Greater productivity with more automation and less manual meddling

• Greater reliability due to less physical blunders

• Increased visibility into systems via automated workflows

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

• Improved distribution network and merchant connections and self-managed portal

• Greater aptitude to oversee for safety and compliance

Since we’ve reviewed what AP and purchase order automation is, how it works, and why it’s important, let’s begin our software review on Sharepoint as opposed to M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

In this chapter, we’re going to first take a look at a fundamental breakdown between the rate and aptitudes of SharePoint and M-Files, followed by an in-depth analysis on their AP and purchase order automation potential.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

While this section provides a decent standard side-by-side evaluation, it doesn’t tell us much about how these programs handle tasks such as purchase order automation. Thus in this next portion, we’re providing an overview of each solution and how it manages this significant operation.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is amongst the most recognized and endorsed enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS tools, owing to its deep connection with different prevalent Microsoft tools like Excel, Outlook, and Word.

In the context of purchase order automation, SharePoint enables you to resolve all the problems you may be experiencing with your current, physical purchase request arrangement.

Order Tracking

To start, by employing Microsoft SharePoint and incorporating Office 365 applications, personnel may oversee purchase orders at all phase from request authorizations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also allow your business to tailor your automated purchase request arrangement to your specific instructions and necessities.

Elements you may custom tailor within SharePoint comprise of the layout of the purchase order forms, multi-level approvals, role assignments, line items, and filters based on location, type, payment terms, and more.

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 could also promote communication among departments. As soon as the PO process has begun, SharePoint could trigger an automated email to all appropriate groups to notify them that the process has commenced and once more when it’s complete.

Interactive Dashboards

One more significant aspect of automation is the insight into efficiency and workflow visibility. SharePoint enables this by allowing you to supervise purchase requisition progress via an interactive dashboard.

With the dashboard setup, you could monitor purchase requisition history among departments, distinguish the breakdown of approval vs denial proportion, and track the position of POs in progress.

Vigorous Integrations

Moreover, SharePoint enables great adaptability in that it can work with with most tools between departments for increased cooperation.

For instance, if a department submits a purchase order for a network printer; once the order is actioned, SharePoint can spontaneously generate an entry in your finance tool for the new IT resource.

Now that we’ve discussed 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 vigorous enterprise content management (ECM) tool that provides both local, cloud solutions, or a hybrid adaptation depending on your company needs.

Its interface is modeled off the Windows Explorer internet browser making it convenient to learn and perform for departments that are comfortable with the Windows interface.

Moreover, M-Files grants innovative functionality that allows organizations to automate operations and processes like purchase order automation. Let’s study those capabilities.

Input

With M-Files you may gather invoices from central or assigned sites and mechanize the gathering of significant data related to your purchase order and approval processes.

Data entry

As a continuation of the input aptitude, M-Files allows users to pinpoint and extract information from purchase order domains to facilitate the automation and transmission process. Moreover, M-Files permits you to input any pertinent company regulations, confirmation specifications and includes directory searches to help ensure precision across the procedure.

Matching and coding

As an advanced functional scope, M-Files may carry out corresponding of POs and GL coding of non-PO invoices in your ERP procedure to facilitate organization and transmission.

Automated approvals

The M-Files solution can regulate and mechanize as much of the authorization procedure as you want. This includes overseeing, queues, routing, response, and aging accounts. Any purchase request that fails the approval process can be revised physically and then put back into the mechanization flow for approval.

Automatic storage of approved POs

Once validation has been issued, purchase requisitions can be forwarded to finance automatically to finalize processing and storage in a main cache.

How Wave Can Assist You in Enforcing Your Purchase Order Automation Solution in Newark

Holding your organization fierce today requires streamlining your operations and removing the impasses from your undertakings that mitigate your efficiency and productivity. It also requires selecting the proper business tools to complete your strategic growth objectives.

At Wave, we can assist by examining the foundational pieces of your business and via gradual digital conversion and business workflow automation, reform them.

We apply a blended set of innovations in accordance with your business needs to digitize your tedious processes around collecting, regulating, and filing data so that it's easy to locate and utilize at any time, from anywhere.

We can assist you in customizing your AP automation software to fit your organization’s precise needs and we willingly work with upwards of 60 industry-acknowledged ECM and DMS solutions including OpenText, M-Files, SharePoint, and Oracle.

If you’re ready to learn more, contact us today and we can set up a time to chat.