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

Developing competencies in your organizational workflows is a critical initial phase toward digital conversion, back-office upgrading, and giving your company an upper hand in a progressively aggressive professional industry.

Paper-based systems and fragmented systems with logjams make collaboration, efficacy, visibility, and responsibility to partners very complicated.

With accounts payable automation, you can carry out paperless systems into your company and simplify tasks like purchase requests, payment processing, procurement, invoicing, and data input tasks.

Automating these forms of company processes creates more capacity in enterprise resource planning (ERP), better expenditure cuts, and reformed application of your personnel.

In this handbook, we’re evaluating a duo of the most popular platforms geared toward AP proficiency and purchase order mechanization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our goal is to help you select the proper tech stack and cooperate so you may expand and speed up your AP digital transformation.

But prior to starting our product assessment, let’s discuss what purchase request digitization is and how it produces greater capability for your AP workflows.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the concept of utilizing business solutions via machine learning (ML), robotic technology, and artificial intelligence (AI) to digitize the purchase requisition operation and its related tasks.

Through digitization, purchase requisitions may be spontaneously forwarded to the fitting team to begin the authorization routine. Then, immediately after the request is approved, it is instinctively transmitted to the vendor.

While this may not appear to be significant at first glance, digitizing the purchasing procedure abolishes the necessity for a physical process, tangible schemes, and streamlines the standard time-consuming workflow.

For example, with purchase order solution or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool, you can develop automated purchase requests that vendors can comprehend followed by having the information spontaneously integrated into your accounting tool.

This presumably small capability greatly streamlines the system, dramatically lessens the need for manual meddling, and consequently, improves productivity through your Accounts Payable division.

The Benefits of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We covered a number of the benefits of AP mechanization in the former section, but just to make sure you get the point, let's dissect these advantages in the simplest terms.

• Mechanized data logging and storage

• Improved productivity via further automation and less by-hand interference

• Greater accuracy due to less physical error

• Enhanced visibility into procedures with your automated workflows

• Actual-time analytics, auditing, and reporting to sustain the betterment of performances

• Reformed supply network and merchant relationships and self-managed portal

• Enhanced ability to monitor for safety and conformity

So now that we’ve discussed what AP and purchase order automation is, how it operates, and why it’s significant, let’s get into our product assessment on Sharepoint versus M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

In this portion, we’re reviewing a straightforward breakdown between the pricing and aptitudes of SharePoint and M-Files, and then an in-depth analysis on their AP and purchase requisition automation qualities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

Although this chapter gives a fine general neck-and-neck evaluation, it doesn’t tell us much about how these programs handle tasks namely electronic purchase order. So in this succeeding section, we’re going to do a synopsis of each solution and how it manages this essential operation.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is one of the more recognized and endorsed enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS tools, because of its strong association with different famed Microsoft solutions like Word, Excel, and Outlook.

As it relates to purchase requisition automation, SharePoint enables you to handle each one of the concerns you might be experiencing with your current, physical purchase requisition system.

Order Tracking

To start, by using Microsoft SharePoint and incorporating Office 365 applications, personnel may track purchase requests at every phase from request confirmations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also empower your company to customize your digital purchase order arrangement to your individual directions and requirements.

Aspects you could individualize within SharePoint comprise of the layout of the purchase request forms, line items, multi-level approvals, role assignments, and filters appertaining to type, payment terms, location, and more.

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 can also further correspondence among departments. Once the PO operation has begun, SharePoint may actuate a programmed email to all relevant groups to inform them that the procedure has begun and once more as soon as it’s complete.

Interactive Dashboards

A further important aspect of automation is the insight into capability and workflow visibility. SharePoint provides this by allowing you to supervise purchase order progress with an interactive dashboard.

Via the dashboard framework, you could monitor purchase request history across divisions, view the evaluation of approval vs denial percentage, and monitor the position of ongoing POs.

Powerful Integrations

Furthermore, SharePoint offers terrific versatility in that it can integrate with most tools between departments for greater synergy.

For instance, if a division submits a purchase requisition for a network printer; when the order is processed, SharePoint can automatically generate an entry in your finance tool for the new IT asset.

Now that we’ve discussed what SharePoint can do in terms of aiding you in digitizing your AP processes, let’s move on to M-Files.

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a powerful enterprise content management (ECM) tool that offers both on-premise, cloud solutions, or a hybrid version depending on your organizational requirements.

Its interface is based off of the Windows Explorer internet browser making it easy to learn and execute for teams that are comfortable with the Windows ecosystem.

Moreover, M-Files provides advanced functionality that empowers organizations to digitize tasks and processes such as purchase requisition automation. Let’s examine those capabilities.

Input

With M-Files you could acquire invoices from central or allocated sites and automate the ingestion of significant data linked to your purchase request and authorization workflows.

Data entry

As an extension of the input competence, M-Files empowers customers to pinpoint and withdraw details from purchase order areas to expedite the digitization and routing process. Furthermore, M-Files permits you to input any relevant organizational codes, validation specifications and incorporates directory lookups to assist in ensuring precision across the procedure.

Matching and coding

As a cutting-edge functionality, M-Files can carry out matching of POs and GL coding of non-PO statements in your ERP system to facilitate arrangement and routing.

Automated approvals

The M-Files platform can control and digitize as much of the approval workflow as you desire. This involves overseeing, queues, routing, response, and aging accounts. Any purchase requisition that flunks the validation course can be amended by hand and then restored into the automation flow for approval.

Automatic storage of approved POs

As soon as validation has been issued, purchase orders can be transmitted to finance automatically to wrap up handling and storage in a main repository.

How Wave Can Help You Implement Your Purchase Order Automation Tool in Pittsburgh

Holding your business cutthroat these days means rationalizing your procedures and uprooting the bottlenecks from your undertakings that decrease your efficiency and output. It also involves picking the proper business systems to complete your calculated growth objectives.

At Wave, we can be of assistance by examining the essential elements of your company and via gradual digital switch-over and business workflow automation, transform them.

We use a blended set of solutions in accordance with your organizational needs to mechanize your laborious workflows around gathering, arranging, and registering data so that it's simple to locate and utilize whenever, from wherever.

We can be of assistance in individualizing your AP digitization tool to satisfy your business's particular demands and we gladly go along with upwards of 60 industry-acknowledged ECM and DMS platforms including SharePoint, OpenText, M-Files, and Oracle.

If you’re ready to learn more, contact us today and we can arrange a time to chat.