SharePoint vs M-Files: The Solution For AP Efficiency & Purchase Order Automation in Milwaukee

Creating capabilities in your company processes is a crucial initial stage toward digital conversion, back-office modernization, and supplying your business an advantage in an increasingly cutthroat professional sector.

Concrete systems and fragmented systems with bottlenecks make cooperation, productivity, perceptibility, and responsibility to partners very complex.

With accounts payable mechanization, you may implement paperless operations into your organization and simplify duties like purchase requests, payment processing, procurement, invoicing, and data input processes.

Automating these kinds of business operations generates more capacity in enterprise resource planning (ERP), higher cost savings, and enhanced employment of your manpower.

Within this guide, we’re examining two of the most popular tools used for AP productivity and purchase requisition mechanization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our target is to assist you in selecting the proper solutions stack and cooperate so you can expand and accelerate your AP digital revamping.

But before we begin with our product analysis, let’s do a quick review of what purchase request digitization is and how it produces higher efficiency for your AP workflows.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

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

By means of mechanization, purchase orders can be spontaneously forwarded to the appropriate party to initiate the approval procedure. Then, once the requisition is approved, it is mechanically sent to the vendor.

Although this may not look like much at first glance, digitizing the buying operation abolishes the requirement for a by-hand process, tangible systems, and simplifies the standard labor-intensive workflow.

For example, with purchase requisition solution or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, you can develop electronic purchase requests that vendors can acknowledge followed by having the details spontaneously incorporated into your accounting platform.

This seemingly minor capability greatly expedites the workflow, drastically lessens the demand for by-hand meddling, and thus, enhances efficiency within your Accounts Payable division.

The Perks of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We covered various of the gains of AP digitization in the previous chapter, but to guarantee that you understand, let's break these benefits down in the simplest terms.

• Automated data input and storage

• Improved productivity with further digitization and less by-hand meddling

• Greater reliability on account of less human blunders

• Enhanced visibility into systems via digitized processes

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

• Enhanced distribution process and vendor relationships and self-operated portal

• Greater aptitude to oversee for safety and conformity

Now that we’ve gone over what AP and digital purchase order is, how it functions, and why it’s important, let’s get into our product evaluation on Sharepoint versus M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

Within this chapter, we’re going to first take a look at a straightforward evaluation between the pricing and capabilities of SharePoint and M-Files, succeeded by a deeper dive on their AP and purchase request digitization potential.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

Though this portion gives a decent conventional neck-and-neck evaluation, it doesn’t inform us on how these tools administer workflows such as purchase order automation. Thus in this next chapter, we’re giving an overview of each tool and how it handles this important undertaking.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is one of the more prominent and established enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS solutions, because of its strong association with diverse famed Microsoft programs like Outlook, Word, and Excel.

In the context of purchase order mechanization, SharePoint sanctions you to handle all the problems you might be facing with your existing, physical purchase order arrangement.

Order Tracking

To start, by utilizing Microsoft SharePoint and combining Office 365 tools, personnel may track purchase requests at any stage from request authorizations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also enable your business to customize your electronic purchase order system to your specific guidelines and necessities.

Aspects you may custom tailor within SharePoint involve the layout of the purchase order forms, multi-level approvals, role assignments, line items, and filters appertaining to payment terms, location, type, and more.

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 may also facilitate connection across departments. Once the PO process has commenced, SharePoint may trigger a programmed email to all respective teams to notify them that the operation has commenced and once more as soon as it’s complete.

Interactive Dashboards

Another significant element of automation is the clarity into efficiency and workflow transparency. SharePoint provides this by permitting you to monitor purchase order progress via an interactive dashboard.

Through the dashboard setup, you may monitor purchase requisition history across divisions, distinguish the breakdown of approval vs denial proportion, and monitor the status of POs in progress.

Robust Integrations

SharePoint also provides superb versatility in that it can work with with most solutions across departments for increased collaboration.

For example, if a department presents a purchase request for a network printer; as soon as the order is processed, SharePoint can spontaneously produce an entry in your finance tool for the new IT asset.

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

M-Files Overview

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

Its interface is based off of the Windows Explorer web engine making it easy to learn and implement for departments that are accustomed to the Windows interface.

Furthermore, M-Files provides advanced functionality that allows companies to mechanize workflows and processes such as purchase requisition automation. Let’s study those capabilities.

Input

With M-Files you could gather invoices from primary or assigned sites and mechanize the collection of essential data related to your purchase request and authorization workflows.

Data entry

As a continuation of the input competence, M-Files allows clients to distinguish and extract data from purchase requisition areas to expedite the automation and routing process. Additionally, M-Files permits you to input any appropriate business regulations, confirmation specifications and contains archive lookups to assist in ensuring veracity throughout the process.

Matching and coding

As a state-of-the-art feature-set, M-Files may carry out conforming of POs and GL coding of non-PO statements in your ERP procedure to facilitate arrangement and transmission.

Automated approvals

The M-Files system can regulate and digitize as much of the authorization procedure as you wish. This contains handling, queues, routing, response, and aging accounts. Any purchase requisition that fails the authorization course can be amended manually and then reinstated into the automation flow for validation.

Automatic storage of approved POs

As soon as validation has been issued, purchase requisitions can be sent to finance automatically to wrap up development and storage in a primary database.

How Wave Can Aid You in Executing Your Purchase Order Automation Solution in Milwaukee

Holding your business competitive today requires simplifying your procedures and eliminating the impasses from your systems that work to diminish your capability and productivity. Moreover, it involves choosing the proper business solutions to complete your strategic growth goals.

At Wave, we can be of assistance by analyzing the foundational pieces of your organization and with incremental digital conversion and business system automation, revamp them.

We use a consolidation of technology appertaining to your organizational necessities to mechanize your laborious processes around capturing, regulating, and filing data so that it's easy to track down and use whenever, from wherever.

We can be of assistance in individualizing your AP mechanization software to fit your company’s precise requirements and we happily go along with over 60 industry-acknowledged ECM and DMS tools including OpenText, M-Files, SharePoint, and Oracle.

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