SharePoint vs M-Files: The Solution For AP Efficiency & Purchase Order Automation in St. Louis

Creating competencies in your business processes is a crucial opening step toward digital switch-over, back-office innovation, and granting your company an edge in a progressively competitive professional industry.

Concrete systems and disjointed workflows with logjams make synergy, productivity, visibility, and liability to partners quite difficult.

With accounts payable digitization, you may carry out paperless arrangements into your organization and simplify workflows like purchase requisitions, procurement, invoicing, payment processing, and data input processes.

Automating these forms of company operations creates more proficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), greater cost reductions, and enhanced utilization of your manpower.

Within this guide, we’re reviewing two of the most prevalent platforms used for AP efficiency and purchase request digitization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our goal is to aid you in selecting the right tech stack and partner so you may expand and expedite your AP digital switch-over.

But prior to starting our product assessment, let’s discuss what purchase request mechanization is and how it creates higher efficiency for your AP operations.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the concept of utilizing business solutions through robotic technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to mechanize the purchase request process and its related undertakings.

By means of digitization, purchase orders can be mechanically transmitted to the fitting team to initiate the authorization process. Later, once the requisition is confirmed, it is mechanically sent to the vendor.

While this may not appear to be significant at first glance, mechanizing the procurement process removes the necessity for a physical process, tangible arrangements, and expedites the often laborious workflow.

For instance, with purchase request software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, you can produce digital purchase requests that suppliers can identify followed by having the information spontaneously fused into your accounting software.

This seemingly minuscule capability substantially simplifies the workflow, remarkably lessens the demand for by-hand interference, and therefore, enhances efficiency inside your Accounts Payable section.

The Advantages of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We talked about a number of the gains of AP digitization in the preceding portion, but to guarantee that you get the point, let's dissect these advantages in absolute terms.

• Digitized data entry and storage

• Improved productivity with further digitization and less human meddling

• Greater precision due to less manual error

• Greater transparency into operations with your automated workflows

• Real-time analytics, auditing, and reporting to continue to improve capacities

• Improved distribution chain and vendor connections and self-managed portal

• Improved capability to oversee for protection and amenability

Since we’ve discussed what AP and purchase order automation is, how it functions, and why it’s significant, let’s start our platform review 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 breakdown between the costing and competencies of SharePoint as well as M-Files, followed by a deeper dive on their AP and purchase order mechanization capabilities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

Although this chapter gives a good conventional simultaneous comparison, it doesn’t tell us much about how these solutions administer workflows namely purchase order automation. Thus in this succeeding chapter, we’re giving a summary of each solution and how it handles this important undertaking.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is amongst the most recognized and accepted enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS platforms, owing to its strong association with different popular Microsoft tools like Excel, Outlook, and Word.

When it comes to purchase requisition mechanization, SharePoint allows you to resolve the entirety of concerns you may be facing with your present-day, by-hand purchase requisition scheme.

Order Tracking

To begin, by utilizing Microsoft SharePoint and combining Office 365 tools, personnel may track purchase requisitions at all level from request authorizations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also empower your business to adapt your electronic purchase order system to your specific instructions and needs.

Elements you can custom tailor within SharePoint involve the format of the purchase order forms, role assignments, line items, multi-level approvals, and filters attributed to location, type, payment terms, and more.

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 could also facilitate correspondence across departments. When the PO process has begun, SharePoint may actuate an automated email to all relevant groups to alert them that the procedure has commenced and once more when it’s complete.

Interactive Dashboards

One more significant element of mechanization is the insight into capability and workflow transparency. SharePoint provides this by authorizing you to oversee purchase requisition progress through an interactive dashboard.

With the dashboard framework, you could oversee purchase request history across departments, distinguish the evaluation of approval vs denial ratio, and track the position of ongoing POs.

Vigorous Integrations

Furthermore, SharePoint provides terrific flexibility in that it can incorporate with most solutions across departments for improved synergy.

For example, if a branch delivers a purchase order for a network printer; once the order is actioned, SharePoint can automatically develop an entry in your finance solution for the new IT resource.

Now that we’ve discussed what SharePoint can accomplish in terms of aiding you in digitizing your AP tasks, 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 version depending on your business needs.

Its interface is modeled off the Windows Explorer web engine making it easy to figure out and implement for parties that are comfortable with the Windows interface.

Moreover, M-Files provides advanced functionality that allows companies to digitize workflows and processes like purchase order automation. Let’s take a look at those capabilities.

Input

With M-Files you could gather invoices from central or distributed areas and mechanize the ingestion of important data linked to your purchase request and approval processes.

Data entry

As a continuation of the input capability, M-Files allows customers to pinpoint and pull out details from purchase order fields to promote the digitization and conveying process. Additionally, M-Files allows you to input any appropriate business regulations, confirmation details and contains database searches to assist in guaranteeing precision across the procedure.

Matching and coding

As a state-of-the-art functionality, M-Files can perform conforming of POs and GL coding of non-PO statements in your ERP system to streamline arrangement and delivery.

Mechanized approvals

The M-Files platform can manage and automate as much of the authorization workflow as you wish. This includes managing, queues, routing, response, and aging accounts. Any purchase requisition that flunks the authorization procedure can be amended physically and then reinstated into the mechanization flow for authorization.

Automatic storage of approved POs

After authorization has been granted, purchase requests can be sent to finance spontaneously to finalize development and storage in a central database.

How Wave Can Aid You in Executing Your Purchase Order Automation Tool in St. Louis

Keeping your organization fierce nowadays involves simplifying your processes and eliminating the hindrances from your workflows that decrease your capability and productivity. Additionally, it involves selecting the appropriate business tools to complete your calculated growth objectives.

At Wave, we can be of assistance by analyzing the fundamental aspects of your company and with gradual digital conversion and organizational system automation, transform them.

We utilize a blended set of solutions based on your business requirements to automate your repetitive workflows around capturing, organizing, and cataloging data so that it's simple to locate and utilize at any time, from anywhere.

We can help you to custom-tailor your AP automation solution to fulfill your company’s particular needs and we happily go along with over 60 industry-acknowledged ECM and DMS tools including SharePoint, OpenText, M-Files, and Oracle.

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