SharePoint vs M-Files: The Tool For AP Proficiency & Purchase Order Automation in WinstonSalem
Generating capabilities in your organizational workflows is a critical opening step toward digital switch-over, back-office modernization, and granting your business an upper hand in an increasingly aggressive professional sector.
Paper-based systems and fragmented workflows with bottlenecks make cooperation, productivity, visibility, and responsibility to partners quite difficult.
By means of accounts payable automation, you can achieve cloud-based operations into your company and streamline tasks like purchase requisitions, invoicing, payment processing, procurement, and data entry workflows.
Mechanizing these kinds of company workflows produces more capacity in enterprise resource planning (ERP), higher cost savings, and improved utilization of your human resources.
In this guide, we’re evaluating a duo of the most popular solutions used for AP efficiency and purchase requisition mechanization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our objective is to help you select the proper toolset and collaborate so you could augment and expedite your AP digital revamping.
But prior to starting our product analysis, let’s do a quick review of what purchase request automation is and how it generates greater efficiency for your AP operations.
What is Purchase Order Automation?
Purchase order automation is the concept of using business solutions with robotic technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to digitize the purchase order process and its synonymous tasks.
By means of mechanization, purchase requests could be automatically transmitted to the relevant team to begin the approval process. Then, immediately after the request is approved, it is instinctively transmitted to the vendor.
Though this may not look like much at first glance, digitizing the purchasing procedure removes the requirement for a by-hand process, materialized schemes, and simplifies the often labor-intensive workflow.
For instance, with purchase order software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, you can create electronic purchase orders that vendors can acknowledge and then have the details automatically fused into your accounting tool.
This seemingly small ability substantially simplifies the process, drastically reduces the requirement for by-hand interference, and consequently, improves proficiency within your Accounts Payable section.
The Benefits of AP and Purchase Order Automation
We covered various of the gains of AP automation in the former chapter, but to guarantee that you get the idea, let's break these benefits down in the simplest terms.
Automated data input and storage
Improved productivity with further digitization and less human interference
Greater accuracy because of less human faults
Enhanced perceptibility into operations through your digitized tasks
Real-time reporting, analytics, and auditing to sustain the betterment of efficiencies
Reformed distribution chain and vendor affinities and self-service portal
Greater aptitude to regulate for safety and compliance
So now that we’ve discussed what AP and purchase order automation is, how it operates, and why it’s vital, let’s start our platform assessment on Sharepoint versus M-Files.
Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review
Coming in this portion, we’re examining a basic evaluation between the rate and aptitudes of SharePoint and M-Files, and then a deeper dive on their AP and purchase requisition mechanization potential.
Basic Price and Features Breakdown
Though this chapter presents a fine general side-by-side evaluation, it doesn’t tell us much about how these solutions handle tasks namely digital purchase order. Thus in this next chapter, we’re giving a summary of each solution and how it administers this essential operation.
Microsoft SharePoint Overview
SharePoint is one of the more recognized and established enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS tools, owing to its deep connection with other famed Microsoft tools like Excel, Outlook, and Word.
When it comes to purchase order mechanization, SharePoint enables you to address all the issues you could be experiencing with your existing, manual purchase request arrangement.
Order Tracking
To start, by utilizing Microsoft SharePoint and incorporating Office 365 programs, personnel could monitor purchase requests at every phase from request authorizations to delivery.
Customization
SharePoint and Office 365 also allow your business to tailor your automated purchase order scheme to your particular guidelines and necessities.
Components you could personalize within SharePoint comprise of the template of the purchase request forms, role assignments, line items, multi-level approvals, and filters attributed to type, payment terms, location, and more.
Communication
SharePoint and Office 365 may also further communication among divisions. As soon as the PO operation has started, SharePoint can trigger a mechanized email to all respective teams to alert them that the operation has begun and again once it’s accomplished.
Interactive Dashboards
A further significant component of digitization is the foresight into efficiency and workflow perceptibility. SharePoint provides this by allowing you to oversee purchase order progress through an interactive dashboard.
Via the dashboard setup, you can oversee purchase request history among sections, see the evaluation of approval vs denial ratio, and track the position of POs in progress.
Vigorous Integrations
SharePoint also offers superb adaptability in that it can work with with most solutions between departments for increased cooperation.
Such as, if a branch delivers a purchase requisition for a network printer; when the order is processed, SharePoint can automatically produce an entry in your finance solution for the new IT resource.
Now that we’ve seen what SharePoint is capable of in terms of aiding you in digitizing your AP processes, let’s continue to M-Files.
M-Files Overview
M-Files is a vigorous enterprise content management (ECM) system that provides both on-site, cloud solutions, or a hybrid variant determined by your business requirements.
Its interface is derived from the Windows Explorer web browser making it convenient to understand and implement for departments that are comfortable with the Windows operating system.
Additionally, M-Files grants state-of-the-art functionality that allows organizations to automate operations and processes suchlike purchase request automation. Let’s take a look at those aptitudes.
Input
With M-Files you can capture invoices from central or distributed locations and mechanize the ingestion of essential data associated with your purchase request and confirmation processes.
Data entry
As an extension of the input capability, M-Files enables clients to pinpoint and extract information from purchase request domains to facilitate the mechanization and transmission process. Furthermore, M-Files enables you to input any relevant company regulations, validation terms and includes database lookups to help ensure accuracy during the process.
Matching and coding
As a cutting-edge feature-set, M-Files can execute matching of POs and GL coding of non-PO billing statements in your ERP operation to simplify structure and delivery.
Automated approvals
The M-Files platform can regulate and mechanize as much of the approval procedure as you want. This contains managing, response, queues, routing, and aging reports. Any purchase request that flunks the approval course can be amended manually and then put back into the digitization flow for approval.
Automatic storage of approved POs
After authorization has been granted, purchase requisitions can be sent to finance spontaneously to finalize processing and storage in a main database.
How Wave Can Help You Implement Your Purchase Order Automation Tool in WinstonSalem
Keeping your business competitive today means streamlining your operations and uprooting the bottlenecks from your systems that work to diminish your proficiency and output. Moreover, it requires picking the right business solutions to achieve your strategic growth objectives.
At Wave, we can be of assistance by examining the fundamental pieces of your organization and with incremental digital switch-over and business process automation, transform them.
We apply a consolidation of innovations based on your organizational requirements to digitize your tedious processes around capturing, organizing, and cataloging data so that it's uncomplicated to track down and utilize whenever, from any location.
We can be of assistance in individualizing your AP digitization tool to satisfy your organization’s precise needs and we gladly go along with upwards of 60 industry-acknowledged ECM and DMS platforms 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.