SharePoint vs M-Files: The Platform For AP Efficiency & Purchase Order Automation in Indianapolis

Developing competencies in your organizational workflows is a critical opening step toward digital transformation, back-office modernization, and supplying your organization an upper hand in a progressively competitive professional sector.

Tangible operations and fragmented workflows with logjams make synergy, productivity, perceptibility, and accountability to partners notably complex.

With accounts payable digitization, you may carry out dematerialized systems into your organization and streamline duties like purchase requisitions, procurement, invoicing, payment processing, and data logging workflows.

Digitizing these kinds of organizational processes generates more capacity in enterprise resource planning (ERP), greater cost reductions, and improved employment of your human resources.

In this manual, we’re evaluating a couple of the most popular platforms designed for AP productivity and purchase order automation: SharePoint and M-Files. Our objective is to help you select the right tech stack and collaborate so you could expand and speed up your AP digital transformation.

But before we begin with our product assessment, let’s discuss what purchase request automation is and how it generates greater productivity for your AP processes.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the concept of using business solutions with machine learning (ML), robotic technology, and artificial intelligence (AI) to automate the purchase request system and its synonymous tasks.

Via digitization, purchase orders could be automatically sent to the fitting company to begin the approval process. After, as soon as the request is authorized, it is automatically forwarded to the vendor.

Though this may not seem like much at first read, automating the procurement process abolishes the requirement for a by-hand process, materialized schemes, and expedites the standard labor-intensive workflow.

For instance, with purchase request software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool, you can develop electronic purchase orders that vendors can identify at which point the data mechanically fused into your accounting platform.

This presumably small aptitude substantially streamlines the process, dramatically reduces the demand for manual interference, and consequently, improves proficiency inside your Accounts Payable section.

The Perks of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We discussed several of the advantages of AP automation in the preceding chapter, but to guarantee that you get the point, let's take these advantages apart in the simplest terms.

• Automated data entry and storage

• Improved competence via extra mechanization and less by-hand interference

• Improved reliability on account of less physical faults

• Greater transparency into procedures via digitized workflows

• Real-time reporting, analytics, and auditing to sustain the betterment of capacities

• Improved distribution process and merchant relationships and self-operated portal

• Enhanced capability to monitor for security and conformity

Since we’ve gone over what AP and purchase order automation is, how it works, and why it’s vital, let’s get into our software evaluation on Sharepoint vs M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

In this chapter, we’re reviewing a straightforward analysis between the rate and capabilities of SharePoint as well as M-Files, and then an extensive review on their AP and purchase order automation capabilities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

Although this portion presents a decent general neck-and-neck comparison, it doesn’t tell us much about how these programs manage workflows such as purchase order automation. Therefore in this next chapter, we’re providing a synopsis of each tool and how it handles this significant undertaking.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is amongst the most prominent and established enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS platforms, due to its strong association with diverse prevalent Microsoft solutions like Word, Excel, and Outlook.

In the context of purchase requisition automation, SharePoint allows you to address each one of the problems you might be facing with your present-day, by-hand purchase order scheme.

Order Tracking

To begin, by employing Microsoft SharePoint and integrating Office 365 applications, staff can track purchase orders at any phase from request authorizations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also empower your business to customize your automated purchase order scheme to your individual guidelines and requirements.

Elements you may personalize within SharePoint comprise of the format 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 may also facilitate connection between divisions. Once the PO process has started, SharePoint could prompt a mechanized email to all appropriate teams to alert them that the operation has commenced and again once it’s complete.

Interactive Dashboards

Another significant aspect of mechanization is the clarity into efficiency and workflow perceptibility. SharePoint delivers this by allowing you to supervise purchase request progress via an interactive dashboard.

With the dashboard system, you can oversee purchase requisition history across divisions, view the breakdown of approval vs denial percentage, and monitor the position of POs in progress.

Robust Integrations

SharePoint also enables terrific adaptability in that it can integrate with most tools among departments for improved synergy.

Such as, if a department delivers a purchase request for a network printer; as soon as the order is processed, SharePoint can mechanically 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 tasks, 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 version contingent on your company requirements.

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

Additionally, M-Files offers innovative functionality that empowers organizations to mechanize tasks and processes like purchase order automation. Let’s examine those capabilities.

Input

With M-Files you could capture invoices from main or distributed locations and automate the collection of significant data associated with your purchase request and confirmation undertaking.

Data entry

As an extension of the input competence, M-Files enables customers to distinguish and pull out data from purchase order fields to expedite the mechanization and routing process. Additionally, M-Files allows you to input any appropriate organizational regulations, validation specifications and includes database lookups to assist in guaranteeing precision throughout the process.

Matching and coding

As an advanced functional scope, M-Files can carry out matching of POs and GL coding of non-PO statements in your ERP operation to streamline organization and transmission.

Mechanized approvals

The M-Files solution can manage and mechanize as much of the confirmation workflow as you wish. This includes handling, queues, routing, response, and aging reports. Any purchase request that flunks the validation process can be corrected by hand and then put back into the mechanization flow for authorization.

Automatic storage of approved POs

After approval has been accepted, purchase requisitions can be forwarded to finance spontaneously to finalize development and storage in a primary cache.

How Wave Can Aid You in Executing Your Purchase Order Automation Platform in Indianapolis

Holding your organization cutthroat these days involves streamlining your processes and eliminating the hindrances from your workflows that mitigate your proficiency and output. Additionally, it requires choosing the appropriate business systems to accomplish your strategic growth aims.

At Wave, we can assist by studying the essential aspects of your business and through incremental digital conversion and organizational workflow automation, revamp them.

We apply a combination of solutions based on your organizational necessities to digitize your laborious workflows around capturing, organizing, and registering data so that it's simple to track down and utilize whenever, from wherever.

We can assist you in customizing your AP mechanization tool to fit your organization’s particular requirements and we willingly collaborate with over 60 industry-acknowledged ECM and DMS tools including OpenText, M-Files, SharePoint, and Oracle.

If you’re interested in learning more, reach out today and we can arrange a time to chat.