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

Developing efficiencies in your organizational operations is a critical first step toward digital switch-over, back-office upgrading, and supplying your company an advantage in a progressively cutthroat professional sector.

Tangible operations and disjointed processes with logjams make cooperation, productivity, perceptibility, and responsibility to stakeholders very complicated.

By means of accounts payable digitization, you can implement paperless operations into your organization and expedite workflows like purchase requests, payment processing, procurement, invoicing, and data input tasks.

Mechanizing these forms of company processes creates more proficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), higher cost savings, and improved utilization of your manpower.

In this manual, we’re evaluating a couple of the most popular tools designed for AP productivity and purchase order automation: SharePoint and M-Files. Our target is to aid you in selecting the proper tech stack and cooperate so you can augment and accelerate your AP digital revamping.

But prior to starting our product analysis, let’s discuss what purchase requisition automation is and how it creates higher efficiency for your AP workflows.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

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

By means of mechanization, purchase orders may be automatically transmitted to the appropriate party to initiate the approval process. Later, immediately after the requisition is confirmed, it is automatically transmitted to the merchant.

Though this may not appear to be significant at first glance, mechanizing the purchasing procedure abolishes the necessity for a physical process, materialized systems, and expedites the standard labor-intensive workflow.

For example, with purchase order solution or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool, you can produce automated purchase requisitions that vendors can comprehend followed by having the details spontaneously incorporated into your accounting platform.

This superficially minuscule ability greatly streamlines the workflow, drastically reduces the requirement for by-hand interference, and thus, amplifies proficiency within your Accounts Payable division.

The Advantages of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We discussed various of the benefits of AP automation in the preceding section, but to be certain that you understand, let's take these advantages apart in absolute terms.

• Digitized data entry and storage

• Greater efficiency through extra digitization and less by-hand interference

• Greater accuracy due to less manual blunders

• Greater visibility into procedures through your digitized tasks

• Current-time reporting, analytics, and auditing to uphold the development of efficiencies

• Enhanced distribution process and merchant affinities and self-managed portal

• Greater capability to regulate for security and conformity

Since we’ve discussed what AP and digital purchase order is, how it operates, and why it’s significant, let’s start our platform evaluation on Sharepoint as opposed to M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

Coming in this portion, we’re examining a straightforward analysis between the rate and competencies of SharePoint and M-Files, and then a deeper dive on their AP and purchase order mechanization potential.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

Although this section gives a fine conventional simultaneous analogy, it doesn’t inform us on how these tools administer tasks namely purchase order automation. Thus in this following section, we’re providing an overview of each solution and how it handles this essential undertaking.

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 other popular Microsoft solutions like Excel, Outlook, and Word.

When it comes to purchase requisition digitization, SharePoint sanctions you to handle the entirety of issues you may be confronting with your present-day, manual purchase request system.

Order Tracking

To initiate, by employing Microsoft SharePoint and combining Office 365 applications, personnel could oversee purchase requisitions at all stage from request authorizations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also empower your organization to adapt your digital purchase request arrangement to your individual instructions and necessities.

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

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 can also further communication across sectors. As soon as the PO procedure has begun, SharePoint can prompt an automated email to all relevant parties to alert them that the procedure has commenced and once more when it’s complete.

Interactive Dashboards

A further critical element of digitization is the foresight into capability and workflow visibility. SharePoint provides this by authorizing you to supervise purchase request progress with an interactive dashboard.

With the dashboard framework, you can monitor purchase order history across departments, view the breakdown of approval vs denial percentage, and follow the position of ongoing POs.

Robust Integrations

Moreover, SharePoint offers terrific adaptability in that it can integrate with most solutions across departments for increased cooperation.

For instance, if a division presents a purchase requisition for a network printer; as soon as the requisition is actioned, SharePoint can automatically develop an entry in your finance tool for the new IT asset.

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

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a vigorous enterprise content management (ECM) solution that offers both on-site, cloud solutions, or a hybrid variant determined by your business demands.

Its interface is based off of the Windows Explorer web engine making it easy to figure out and perform for teams that are used to the Windows ecosystem.

Additionally, M-Files offers state-of-the-art functionality that empowers organizations to mechanize tasks and processes such as purchase request automation. Let’s take a look at those capabilities.

Input

With M-Files you may acquire invoices from primary or allocated areas and automate the collection of important data associated with your purchase order and approval undertaking.

Data entry

As a continuation of the input competence, M-Files enables clients to identify and withdraw data from purchase order domains to expedite the automation and transmission process. Additionally, M-Files enables you to input any relevant company codes, validation details and incorporates archive searches to help ensure precision across the procedure.

Matching and coding

As an advanced feature-set, M-Files can perform matching of POs and GL coding of non-PO statements in your ERP operation to simplify organization and delivery.

Digitized approvals

The M-Files platform can manage and digitize as much of the approval procedure as you desire. This involves handling, response, queues, routing, and aging reports. Any purchase requisition that falls short of the authorization procedure can be amended physically and then restored into the digitization flow for authorization.

Automatic storage of approved POs

After approval has been issued, purchase requests can be sent to finance spontaneously to finalize handling and storage in a main database.

How Wave Can Aid You in Executing Your Purchase Order Automation Tool in Buffalo

Keeping your business competitive these days involves simplifying your processes and uprooting the impasses from your systems that work to diminish your efficiency and efficacy. Additionally, it requires picking the appropriate business solutions to achieve your tactical growth goals.

At Wave, we can be of assistance by analyzing the essential pieces of your business and with incremental digital transformation and organizational system automation, reform them.

We apply a consolidation of solutions appertaining to your organizational needs to digitize your repetitive processes around collecting, regulating, and cataloging data so that it's easy to locate and use at any time, from anywhere.

We can help you to custom-tailor your AP digitization solution to fit your organization’s specific demands and we gladly go along with over 60 industry-acknowledged ECM and DMS platforms including OpenText, M-Files, SharePoint, and Oracle.

If you’re interested in learning more, connect with us today and we can schedule a time to chat.