SharePoint vs M-Files: The Tool For AP Proficiency & Purchase Order Automation in Henderson
Generating efficiencies in your organizational workflows is a critical opening step toward digital conversion, back-office upgrading, and granting your business an advantage in a progressively competitive professional sector.
Concrete arrangements and incoherent processes with logjams make collaboration, productivity, perceptibility, and accountability to stakeholders quite complex.
Through accounts payable digitization, you can achieve cloud-based systems into your business and streamline tasks like purchase orders, payment processing, procurement, invoicing, and data input tasks.
Digitizing these types of company workflows creates more capacity in enterprise resource planning (ERP), higher cost reductions, and reformed application of your human resources.
In this manual, we’re reviewing a duo of the most prevalent solutions geared toward AP efficiency and purchase order automation: SharePoint and M-Files. Our target is to aid you in selecting the right toolset and cooperate so you could augment and accelerate your AP digital transformation.
But before we begin with our product analysis, let’s discuss what purchase requisition automation is and how it generates higher productivity for your AP processes.
What is Purchase Order Automation?
Purchase order automation is the notion of utilizing business tools through machine learning (ML), robotic technology, and artificial intelligence (AI) to digitize the purchase requisition system and its synonymous tasks.
Via automation, purchase requests may be automatically forwarded to the appropriate company to begin the approval process. Then, as soon as the request is authorized, it is instinctively forwarded to the vendor.
Although this may not seem like much at first read, digitizing the procurement operation abolishes the requirement for a by-hand process, tangible schemes, and streamlines the often time-consuming workflow.
For example, with purchase requisition solution or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, you can develop automated purchase requests that vendors can acknowledge at which point the information spontaneously integrated into your accounting software.
This superficially small capability greatly expedites the workflow, remarkably diminishes the demand for human interference, and consequently, enhances productivity within your Accounts Payable department.
The Benefits of AP and Purchase Order Automation
We talked about various of the advantages of AP digitization in the previous portion, but to be certain that you get the idea, let's take these advantages apart in plain language.
Digitized data entry and storage
Greater productivity with extra automation and less manual meddling
Enhanced reliability due to less manual faults
Greater perceptibility into operations through your mechanized workflows
Current-time reporting, analytics, and auditing to sustain the betterment of efficiencies
Improved distribution chain and merchant affinities and self-managed portal
Improved capability to monitor for protection and conformity
Since we’ve gone over what AP and digital purchase order is, how it operates, and why it’s important, let’s begin our product evaluation on Sharepoint versus M-Files.
Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review
In this portion, we’re going to first take a look at a straightforward evaluation between the costing and aptitudes of SharePoint and M-Files, and then an extensive review on their AP and purchase requisition mechanization potential.
Basic Price and Features Breakdown
Although this section provides a decent standard neck-and-neck analogy, it doesn’t inform us on how these solutions manage tasks like electronic purchase order. So in this following chapter, we’re giving a synopsis of each program and how it manages this important operation.
Microsoft SharePoint Overview
SharePoint is amongst the most widely known and accepted enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS solutions, because of its deep connection with other prevalent Microsoft tools like Outlook, Word, and Excel.
As it relates to purchase request digitization, SharePoint allows you to resolve the entirety of issues you could be facing with your present-day, manual purchase requisition arrangement.
Order Tracking
To initiate, by using Microsoft SharePoint and combining Office 365 applications, team members could oversee purchase requests at any phase from request authorizations to delivery.
Customization
SharePoint and Office 365 also enable your company to adapt your electronic purchase request system to your particular directions and needs.
Elements you can individualize within SharePoint include the layout of the purchase order forms, line items, multi-level approvals, role assignments, and filters attributed to payment terms, location, type, and more.
Communication
SharePoint and Office 365 can also further communication across sectors. When the PO process has commenced, SharePoint may actuate a mechanized email to all relevant parties to notify them that the procedure has begun and once more when it’s accomplished.
Interactive Dashboards
A further important element of mechanization is the foresight into capability and workflow visibility. SharePoint provides this by allowing you to oversee purchase order progress through an interactive dashboard.
Via the dashboard framework, you may monitor purchase order history across sections, see the analysis of approval vs denial proportion, and track the state of POs in progress.
Robust Integrations
Furthermore, SharePoint offers superb flexibility in that it can incorporate with most programs across departments for greater cooperation.
Such as, if a branch presents a purchase request for a network printer; once the request is actioned, SharePoint can spontaneously produce an entry in your finance software for the new IT asset.
Now that we’ve discussed what SharePoint can do in terms of aiding you in digitizing your AP workflows, let’s move on to M-Files.
M-Files Overview
M-Files is a vigorous enterprise content management (ECM) solution that provides both local, cloud solutions, or a hybrid adaptation determined by your organizational needs.
Its interface is based off of the Windows Explorer web browser making it easy to learn and implement for teams that are accustomed to the Windows operating system.
Moreover, M-Files grants state-of-the-art functionality that enables businesses to automate workflows and processes like purchase requisition automation. Let’s study those competencies.
Input
With M-Files you can acquire invoices from primary or distributed sites and mechanize the gathering of significant data linked to your purchase request and confirmation undertaking.
Data entry
As a continuation of the input competence, M-Files allows clients to pinpoint and pull out data from purchase order fields to promote the digitization and conveying process. Additionally, M-Files enables you to input any relevant business codes, validation specifications and includes database searches to help ensure precision across the process.
Matching and coding
As a cutting-edge functionality, M-Files could perform corresponding of POs and GL coding of non-PO statements in your ERP procedure to facilitate organization and delivery.
Digitized approvals
The M-Files system can manage and automate as much of the authorization procedure as you desire. This includes managing, routing, response, queues, and aging accounts. Any purchase requisition that falls short of the approval process can be revised physically and then restored into the digitization flow for approval.
Automatic storage of approved POs
After authorization has been granted, purchase requests can be sent to finance spontaneously to wrap up processing and storage in a main repository.
How Wave Can Help You Implement Your Purchase Order Automation Solution in Henderson
Keeping your business cutthroat nowadays involves rationalizing your operations and eliminating the hindrances from your systems that decrease your capability and output. Additionally, it requires selecting the right business solutions to achieve your calculated growth aims.
At Wave, we can assist by studying the essential pieces of your business and with gradual digital transformation and company workflow automation, transform them.
We use a combination of solutions appertaining to your business requirements to digitize your repetitive processes around capturing, organizing, and filing data so that it's simple to locate and use whenever, from any location.
We can help you to custom-tailor your AP digitization solution to fulfill your company’s particular requirements and we willingly go along with more than 60 industry-recognized ECM and DMS solutions 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.