SharePoint vs M-Files: The Tool For AP Proficiency & Purchase Order Automation in Baltimore
Creating efficiencies in your business workflows is a pivotal first stage toward digital transformation, back-office innovation, and giving your business an upper hand in a growingly aggressive professional industry.
Concrete systems and incoherent processes with bottlenecks make synergy, efficiency, visibility, and accountability to partners quite complicated.
By means of accounts payable automation, you could carry out cloud-based systems into your company and expedite duties like purchase orders, procurement, invoicing, payment processing, and data entry processes.
Automating these types of company processes produces more capacity in enterprise resource planning (ERP), greater cost reductions, and improved employment of your human resources.
Within this manual, we’re evaluating a duo of the most famous platforms geared toward AP efficiency and purchase requisition digitization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our goal is to assist you in selecting the right tech stack and partner so you may augment and expedite your AP digital switch-over.
But prior to starting our product review, let’s talk through what purchase order automation is and how it creates further productivity for your AP operations.
What is Purchase Order Automation?
Purchase order automation is the process of employing business tools with robotic technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to automate the purchase requisition system and its related tasks.
Through digitization, purchase orders may be automatically forwarded to the appropriate team to begin the authorization procedure. After, immediately after the request is authorized, it is instinctively forwarded to the supplier.
Though this may not seem like much at first read, digitizing the buying operation eliminates the need for a physical process, tangible systems, and streamlines the often labor-intensive workflow.
For example, with purchase order software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, you can develop electronic purchase requests that contractors can acknowledge at which point the information automatically fused into your accounting platform.
This superficially small ability substantially streamlines the process, drastically reduces the need for by-hand interference, and therefore, enhances proficiency through your Accounts Payable division.
The Benefits of AP and Purchase Order Automation
We talked about a number of the advantages of AP automation in the former portion, but to guarantee that you get the idea, let's dissect these advantages in absolute terms.
Automated data input and storage
Greater competence through more mechanization and less human interference
Enhanced precision on account of less human error
Increased transparency into operations through your digitized tasks
Current-time reporting, analytics, and auditing to uphold the development of capacities
Enhanced distribution network and supplier connections and self-managed portal
Enhanced capability to monitor for protection and conformity
Since we’ve reviewed what AP and electronic purchase order is, how it functions, and why it’s vital, let’s get into our software evaluation on Sharepoint as opposed to M-Files.
Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review
Coming in this section, we’re going to first take a look at a straightforward evaluation between the costing and aptitudes of SharePoint and M-Files, followed by a deeper dive on their AP and purchase request mechanization qualities.
Basic Price and Features Breakdown
Though this portion presents a fine general side-by-side analogy, it doesn’t tell us much about how these tools handle processes like digital purchase order. Thus in this following section, we’re providing an overview of each solution and how it administers this important undertaking.
Microsoft SharePoint Overview
SharePoint is amongst the most recognized and accepted enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS tools, owing to its close relation to different prevalent Microsoft solutions like Outlook, Word, and Excel.
When it comes to purchase request mechanization, SharePoint allows you to address all the concerns you might be experiencing with your present-day, physical purchase request scheme.
Order Tracking
To begin, by employing Microsoft SharePoint and incorporating Office 365 programs, personnel can monitor purchase requisitions at any level from request confirmations to delivery.
Customization
SharePoint and Office 365 also enable your business to customize your digital purchase order arrangement to your individual guidelines and needs.
Aspects you could individualize within SharePoint include the template of the purchase request forms, multi-level approvals, role assignments, line items, and filters appertaining to type, payment terms, location, and more.
Communication
SharePoint and Office 365 can also promote correspondence among sectors. As soon as the PO operation has started, SharePoint can actuate a mechanized email to all respective parties to notify them that the process has commenced and once more as soon as it’s accomplished.
Interactive Dashboards
Another critical component of mechanization is the clarity into productivity and workflow transparency. SharePoint provides this by permitting you to supervise purchase request progress with an interactive dashboard.
Via the dashboard system, you may oversee purchase order history across sections, view the evaluation of approval vs denial percentage, and monitor the status of ongoing POs.
Robust Integrations
Moreover, SharePoint provides terrific versatility in that it can work with with most solutions across departments for greater cooperation.
Such as, if a branch presents a purchase order for a network printer; when the requisition is handled, SharePoint can mechanically develop an entry in your finance software for the new IT asset.
Now that we’ve discussed what SharePoint can accomplish in terms of assisting you in automating your AP workflows, let’s proceed to M-Files.
M-Files Overview
M-Files is a powerful enterprise content management (ECM) solution that presents both on-premise, cloud solutions, or a hybrid variant depending on your business requirements.
Its interface is derived from the Windows Explorer internet browser making it convenient to learn and implement for teams that are accustomed to the Windows interface.
Moreover, M-Files offers advanced functionality that empowers businesses to digitize workflows and processes like purchase request automation. Let’s examine those competencies.
Input
With M-Files you can capture invoices from main or distributed areas and digitize the ingestion of significant data linked to your purchase requisition and authorization processes.
Data entry
In addition to the input capability, M-Files empowers users to identify and extract details from purchase request fields to facilitate the digitization and conveying process. Additionally, M-Files enables you to input any appropriate organizational rules, validation specifications and incorporates archive searches to help ensure veracity throughout the procedure.
Matching and coding
As a state-of-the-art feature-set, M-Files may execute matching of POs and GL coding of non-PO statements in your ERP system to simplify arrangement and delivery.
Automated approvals
The M-Files system can manage and mechanize as much of the approval procedure as you want. This includes overseeing, queues, routing, response, and aging records. Any purchase request that falls short of the validation process can be revised by hand and then reinstated into the digitization flow for validation.
Automatic storage of approved POs
Once validation has been accepted, purchase requests can be transmitted to finance mechanically to conclude processing and storage in a main repository.
How Wave Can Aid You in Executing Your Purchase Order Automation Platform in Baltimore
Holding your company fierce nowadays requires streamlining your procedures and removing the hindrances from your workflows that decrease your efficiency and efficacy. It also means choosing the right business solutions to achieve your tactical growth objectives.
At Wave, we can be of assistance by studying the fundamental pieces of your business and through incremental digital conversion and company system automation, transform them.
We use a consolidation of solutions based on your business requirements to automate your repetitive tasks around gathering, arranging, and registering data so that it's uncomplicated to track down and access whenever, from any location.
We can be of assistance in individualizing your AP digitization solution to fit your organization’s precise requirements and we willingly go along with more than 60 industry-acknowledged ECM and DMS tools including M-Files, SharePoint, OpenText, and Oracle.
If you’re interested in learning more, contact us today and we can set up a time to chat.