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

Creating capabilities in your business workflows is a crucial first phase toward digital switch-over, back-office upgrading, and supplying your company an upper hand in an increasingly competitive professional sector.

Tangible systems and fragmented workflows with bottlenecks make cooperation, efficacy, perceptibility, and liability to partners very complex.

Through accounts payable mechanization, you could implement paperless arrangements into your company and streamline workflows like purchase requisitions, invoicing, payment processing, procurement, and data input tasks.

Automating these forms of company workflows generates more proficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), greater expenditure cuts, and reformed application of your personnel.

Within this guide, we’re reviewing a duo of the most popular platforms designed for AP productivity and purchase requisition mechanization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our target is to assist you in selecting the appropriate solutions stack and collaborate so you could develop and accelerate your AP digital switch-over.

But prior to starting our product assessment, let’s do a quick review of what purchase request mechanization is and how it generates further capability for your AP workflows.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the concept of employing business solutions via artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotic technology to automate the purchase requisition operation and its synonymous workflows.

Via mechanization, purchase requests can be automatically forwarded to the relevant team to begin the approval procedure. Later, immediately after the requisition is confirmed, it is automatically forwarded to the vendor.

Though this may not appear to be significant at first glance, digitizing the buying process abolishes the necessity for a manual process, tangible arrangements, and simplifies the usual time-consuming workflow.

For example, with purchase request solution or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool, you can produce electronic purchase requisitions that contractors can identify at which point the details automatically integrated into your accounting tool.

This presumably minuscule aptitude significantly streamlines the system, drastically diminishes the demand for human interference, and consequently, improves proficiency inside your Accounts Payable department.

The Benefits of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We covered a number of the gains of AP mechanization in the preceding portion, but to guarantee that you get the idea, let's dissect these advantages in absolute terms.

• Automated data input and storage

• Greater productivity with further automation and less by-hand meddling

• Greater precision due to less physical error

• Increased perceptibility into procedures via mechanized tasks

• Real-time auditing, reporting, and analytics to uphold the development of capacities

• Reformed logistics process and vendor relationships and self-service portal

• Enhanced ability to regulate for security and compliance

Now that we’ve discussed what AP and digital purchase order is, how it works, and why it’s important, let’s start our product evaluation on Sharepoint as opposed to M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

Within this chapter, we’re examining a basic analysis between the costing and capabilities of SharePoint and M-Files, followed by a deeper dive on their AP and purchase request digitization capabilities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

While this portion provides a good conventional simultaneous analogy, it doesn’t tell us much about how these programs administer tasks namely digital purchase order. Therefore in this following section, we’re giving a summary of each program and how it handles this essential operation.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

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

When it comes to purchase requisition automation, SharePoint enables you to handle the entirety of issues you could be confronting with your present-day, manual purchase requisition arrangement.

Order Tracking

To begin, by employing Microsoft SharePoint and integrating Office 365 programs, personnel may monitor purchase orders at all phase from request authorizations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also allow your organization to customize your digital purchase order system to your individual directions and necessities.

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

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 can also promote correspondence between divisions. Once the PO operation has started, SharePoint may actuate a mechanized email to all appropriate parties to alert them that the operation has begun and once more when it’s carried out.

Interactive Dashboards

Another critical aspect of automation is the insight into productivity and workflow visibility. SharePoint provides this by allowing you to oversee purchase requisition progress through an interactive dashboard.

Via the dashboard framework, you could track purchase order history across sections, distinguish the evaluation of approval vs denial percentage, and follow the state of existing POs.

Robust Integrations

SharePoint also enables great flexibility in that it can incorporate with most programs between departments for improved cooperation.

For instance, if a division presents a purchase request for a network printer; when the request is handled, SharePoint can spontaneously develop an entry in your finance software for the new IT resource.

Now that we’ve learned about what SharePoint can do in terms of helping you automate your AP workflows, let’s proceed to M-Files.

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a vigorous enterprise content management (ECM) solution that presents both on-site, cloud solutions, or a hybrid adaptation determined by your company needs.

Its interface is based off of the Windows Explorer internet browser making it simple to figure out and implement for departments that are used to the Windows interface.

Additionally, M-Files grants state-of-the-art functionality that enables organizations to digitize tasks and processes like purchase requisition automation. Let’s study those aptitudes.

Input

With M-Files you can acquire invoices from primary or allocated areas and mechanize the collection of important data related to your purchase request and confirmation undertaking.

Data entry

As a continuation of the input aptitude, M-Files empowers users to distinguish and pull out information from purchase request domains to facilitate the mechanization and conveying process. Furthermore, M-Files permits you to input any pertinent organizational regulations, approval specifications and incorporates directory lookups to help ensure veracity throughout the process.

Matching and coding

As a cutting-edge feature-set, M-Files could execute conforming of POs and GL coding of non-PO billing statements in your ERP operation to simplify organization and transmission.

Mechanized approvals

The M-Files platform can control and automate as much of the authorization process as you desire. This contains handling, response, queues, routing, and aging records. Any purchase order that fails the approval course can be corrected by hand and then restored into the automation flow for validation.

Automatic storage of approved POs

As soon as validation has been issued, purchase requisitions can be sent to finance spontaneously to finalize development and storage in a central cache.

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

Holding your organization cutthroat these days means streamlining your procedures and removing the bottlenecks from your undertakings that decrease your proficiency and efficacy. Additionally, it involves selecting the proper business solutions to accomplish your calculated growth objectives.

At Wave, we can help by examining the foundational elements of your business and via gradual digital switch-over and business process automation, transform them.

We use a consolidation of solutions in accordance with your organizational needs to digitize your repetitive tasks around gathering, regulating, and registering data so that it's easy to track down and utilize at any time, from anywhere.

We can be of assistance in individualizing your AP mechanization software to fulfill your company’s specific demands and we happily collaborate with more than 60 industry-recognized ECM and DMS platforms including M-Files, SharePoint, OpenText, and Oracle.

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