SharePoint vs M-Files: The Solution For AP Productivity & Purchase Order Automation in Laredo

Generating competencies in your business workflows is a crucial first phase toward digital conversion, back-office modernization, and giving your business an advantage in an increasingly competitive professional sector.

Tangible operations and incoherent workflows with impasses make cooperation, productivity, visibility, and liability to shareholders quite complicated.

By means of accounts payable digitization, you could achieve paperless arrangements into your company and streamline workflows like purchase orders, invoicing, payment processing, procurement, and data input processes.

Automating these kinds of organizational operations creates more capacity in enterprise resource planning (ERP), greater cost savings, and improved application of your personnel.

Included in this manual, we’re reviewing a duo of the most prevalent platforms designed for AP efficiency and purchase requisition automation: SharePoint and M-Files. Our goal is to aid you in selecting the proper tech stack and collaborate so you can expand and expedite your AP digital transformation.

But before we begin with our product assessment, let’s talk through what purchase request digitization is and how it creates higher efficiency for your AP operations.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the process of utilizing business software via robotic technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to digitize the purchase order system and its related workflows.

Via digitization, purchase requests may be automatically forwarded to the appropriate team to begin the approval process. Then, immediately after the request is confirmed, it is mechanically sent to the merchant.

While this may not appear to be significant at first glance, mechanizing the buying process abolishes the necessity for a physical process, paper-based schemes, and streamlines the standard laborious workflow.

As an example, with purchase request software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool, you can create automated purchase orders that vendors can comprehend and then have the information automatically fused into your accounting platform.

This presumably small capability significantly simplifies the process, drastically diminishes the demand for human interference, and thus, improves efficiency within your Accounts Payable department.

The Perks of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We discussed a number of the benefits of AP digitization in the former portion, but to guarantee that you get the idea, let's dissect these advantages in plain language.

• Automated data entry and storage

• Enhanced efficiency through further automation and less manual interference

• Enhanced reliability because of less manual faults

• Increased transparency into systems via automated tasks

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

• Enhanced distribution chain and merchant affinities and self-managed portal

• Improved aptitude to regulate for protection and amenability

Since we’ve discussed what AP and digital purchase order is, how it operates, and why it’s vital, let’s get into our platform review on Sharepoint versus M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

In this section, we’re going to first take a look at a straightforward breakdown between the costing and competencies of SharePoint as well as M-Files, and then a deeper dive on their AP and purchase requisition digitization potential.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

While this portion gives a fine general neck-and-neck evaluation, it doesn’t educate us on how these solutions handle tasks such as digital purchase order. So in this succeeding chapter, we’re going to do a synopsis of each program and how it handles this significant undertaking.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is one of the most prominent and established enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS solutions, because of its deep connection with diverse prevalent Microsoft programs like Excel, Outlook, and Word.

When it comes to purchase requisition mechanization, SharePoint allows you to resolve each one of the concerns you might be confronting with your present-day, physical purchase request scheme.

Order Tracking

To start, by utilizing Microsoft SharePoint and combining Office 365 programs, personnel could oversee purchase requisitions at all level from request confirmations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also enable your business to tailor your electronic purchase requisition scheme to your individual guidelines and needs.

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

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 may also facilitate correspondence across divisions. Once the PO process has started, SharePoint could prompt a programmed email to all relevant groups to notify them that the operation has begun and once more as soon as it’s carried out.

Interactive Dashboards

One more significant element of automation is the foresight into efficiency and workflow visibility. SharePoint provides this by authorizing you to supervise purchase request progress with an interactive dashboard.

Via the dashboard system, you could track purchase requisition history across sections, view the breakdown of approval vs denial ratio, and follow the status of existing POs.

Powerful Integrations

SharePoint also offers terrific versatility in that it can integrate with most programs across departments for improved collaboration.

Such as, if a department delivers a purchase request for a network printer; once the order is processed, SharePoint can mechanically generate an entry in your finance software for the new IT asset.

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

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a robust enterprise content management (ECM) tool that presents both on-premise, cloud solutions, or a hybrid variant contingent on your business requirements.

Its interface is based off of the Windows Explorer internet browser making it simple to learn and perform for parties that are accustomed to the Windows ecosystem.

Furthermore, M-Files provides state-of-the-art functionality that enables companies to mechanize workflows and processes suchlike purchase request automation. Let’s take a look at those competencies.

Input

With M-Files you may acquire invoices from primary or allocated areas and digitize the collection of significant data related to your purchase requisition and approval workflows.

Data entry

As an extension of the input aptitude, M-Files allows clients to distinguish and withdraw data from purchase order domains to expedite the mechanization and conveying process. Additionally, M-Files permits you to input any pertinent business rules, approval specifications and incorporates archive searches to assist in ensuring precision across the operation.

Matching and coding

As a state-of-the-art feature-set, M-Files could carry out corresponding of POs and GL coding of non-PO invoices in your ERP operation to facilitate structure and transmission.

Digitized approvals

The M-Files system can regulate and automate as much of the authorization procedure as you want. This contains overseeing, response, queues, routing, and aging accounts. Any purchase requisition that fails the validation process can be corrected by hand and then put back into the automation flow for authorization.

Automatic storage of approved POs

Once approval has been granted, purchase requisitions can be transmitted to finance spontaneously to wrap up development and storage in a primary cache.

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

Keeping your organization cutthroat nowadays requires rationalizing your procedures and uprooting the impasses from your workflows that mitigate your proficiency and efficacy. Additionally, it requires selecting the appropriate business solutions to complete your tactical growth objectives.

At Wave, we can be of assistance by examining the fundamental pieces of your business and with incremental digital transformation and organizational process automation, transform them.

We utilize a consolidation of solutions in accordance with your organizational requirements to automate your repetitive tasks around gathering, arranging, and cataloging data so that it's uncomplicated to track down and access whenever, from wherever.

We can assist you in customizing your AP mechanization software to fit your organization’s precise needs and we happily collaborate with over 60 industry-accepted ECM and DMS solutions including OpenText, M-Files, SharePoint, and Oracle.

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