SharePoint vs M-Files: The Tool For AP Productivity & Purchase Order Automation in St. Petersburg

Generating competencies in your organizational workflows is a critical opening stage toward digital switch-over, back-office upgrading, and supplying your company an upper hand in a progressively aggressive professional sector.

Paper-based arrangements and fragmented workflows with impasses make cooperation, efficacy, perceptibility, and responsibility to partners quite complex.

By means of accounts payable mechanization, you may implement paperless systems into your organization and expedite tasks like purchase orders, invoicing, payment processing, procurement, and data input workflows.

Mechanizing these types of organizational operations creates more proficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), higher expenditure cuts, and enhanced application of your manpower.

Within this manual, we’re examining two of the most popular platforms geared toward AP productivity and purchase requisition digitization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our goal is to help you select the proper toolset and partner so you could expand and speed up your AP digital switch-over.

But before we begin with our product assessment, let’s talk through what purchase order digitization is and how it produces further capability for your AP operations.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

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

Through mechanization, purchase orders can be mechanically sent to the relevant team to start the authorization process. After, immediately after the order is authorized, it is automatically forwarded to the vendor.

Though this may not seem like much at first read, automating the purchasing process eliminates the requirement for a by-hand process, tangible systems, and simplifies the standard labor-intensive workflow.

For example, with purchase request solution or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool, you can produce automated purchase orders that vendors can acknowledge followed by having the information spontaneously fused into your accounting tool.

This presumably minor aptitude significantly simplifies the system, remarkably reduces the demand for by-hand meddling, and thus, enhances productivity through your Accounts Payable division.

The Advantages of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We covered various of the gains of AP mechanization in the previous section, but to be certain that you understand, let's break these benefits down in absolute terms.

• Digitized data logging and storage

• Enhanced productivity through more digitization and less human intervention

• Enhanced precision because of less human error

• Enhanced visibility into systems via mechanized workflows

• Actual-time reporting, analytics, and auditing to continue to improve performances

• Enhanced distribution network and vendor connections and self-service portal

• Greater ability to oversee for safety and amenability

Now that we’ve reviewed what AP and purchase order automation is, how it functions, and why it’s significant, let’s start our software review on Sharepoint vs M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

Coming in this portion, we’re going to first take a look at a basic analysis between the costing and capabilities of SharePoint and M-Files, succeeded by a deeper dive on their AP and purchase order automation potential.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

While this portion gives a good standard neck-and-neck comparison, it doesn’t tell us much about how these programs handle workflows such as electronic purchase order. Therefore in this following portion, we’re giving a synopsis of each tool and how it administers this essential task.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is one of the most prominent and established enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS tools, due to its deep connection with diverse popular Microsoft programs like Excel, Outlook, and Word.

In the context of purchase order automation, SharePoint sanctions you to handle the entirety of problems you might be confronting with your present-day, physical purchase request system.

Order Tracking

To start, by utilizing Microsoft SharePoint and incorporating Office 365 tools, staff could oversee purchase orders at any level from request authorizations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also empower your business to tailor your digital purchase request arrangement to your particular instructions and requirements.

Components you may personalize within SharePoint include the template of the purchase order forms, role assignments, line items, multi-level approvals, and filters attributed to type, payment terms, location, and more.

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 could also promote correspondence between sectors. Once the PO process has started, SharePoint can actuate a programmed email to all relevant parties to notify them that the operation has begun and again once it’s complete.

Interactive Dashboards

One more significant element of mechanization is the clarity into efficiency and workflow visibility. SharePoint delivers this by permitting you to monitor purchase requisition progress via an interactive dashboard.

Via the dashboard framework, you may track purchase requisition history throughout divisions, distinguish the analysis of approval vs denial percentage, and track the state of existing POs.

Vigorous Integrations

SharePoint also offers great adaptability in that it can incorporate with most solutions across departments for greater synergy.

For example, if a division presents a purchase request for a network printer; when the request is processed, SharePoint can spontaneously develop an entry in your finance solution for the new IT asset.

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

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a powerful enterprise content management (ECM) solution that presents both local, cloud solutions, or a hybrid variant determined by your company requirements.

Its interface is based off of the Windows Explorer web browser making it easy to figure out and perform for departments that are accustomed to the Windows interface.

Additionally, M-Files provides innovative functionality that empowers companies to automate operations and processes such as purchase order automation. Let’s take a look at those competencies.

Input

With M-Files you may capture invoices from central or distributed areas and automate the collection of essential data associated with your purchase requisition and approval processes.

Data entry

As an extension of the input competence, M-Files empowers users to distinguish and pull out details from purchase request domains to expedite the digitization and conveying process. Furthermore, M-Files permits you to input any appropriate organizational codes, validation details and contains directory searches to help ensure accuracy throughout the procedure.

Matching and coding

As a cutting-edge feature-set, M-Files could execute matching of POs and GL coding of non-PO billing statements in your ERP system to streamline arrangement and transmission.

Automated approvals

The M-Files solution can regulate and digitize as much of the approval procedure as you wish. This contains handling, routing, response, queues, and aging accounts. Any purchase order that falls short of the validation course can be amended manually and then restored into the digitization flow for validation.

Automatic storage of approved POs

After authorization has been granted, purchase orders can be transmitted to finance automatically to conclude handling and storage in a central cache.

How Wave Can Assist You in Enforcing Your Purchase Order Automation Solution in St. Petersburg

Keeping your organization fierce nowadays means streamlining your processes and uprooting the bottlenecks from your workflows that mitigate your efficiency and productivity. It also means selecting the right business systems to complete your strategic growth objectives.

At Wave, we can be of assistance by examining the fundamental pieces of your organization and via incremental digital conversion and company workflow automation, transform them.

We utilize a consolidation of innovations in accordance with your company necessities to digitize your repetitive processes around capturing, regulating, and cataloging data so that it's simple to track down and utilize whenever, from any location.

We can be of assistance in individualizing your AP automation solution to fulfill your company’s particular demands and we willingly collaborate with more than 60 industry-acknowledged ECM and DMS tools including SharePoint, OpenText, M-Files, and Oracle.

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