SharePoint vs M-Files: The Solution For AP Efficiency & Purchase Order Automation in Bakersfield
Generating competencies in your business workflows is a critical first stage toward digital transformation, back-office modernization, and granting your business an edge in a progressively competitive professional landscape.
Paper-based operations and incoherent processes with impasses make synergy, efficacy, transparency, and responsibility to partners quite complex.
By means of accounts payable mechanization, you can implement dematerialized systems into your company and simplify workflows like purchase requisitions, procurement, invoicing, payment processing, and data input processes.
Digitizing these kinds of business workflows produces more proficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), better cost reductions, and improved application of your human resources.
Included in this manual, we’re evaluating two of the most prevalent solutions used for AP productivity and purchase order mechanization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our goal is to aid you in selecting the right tech stack and partner so you could develop and accelerate your AP digital revamping.
But prior to starting our product assessment, let’s do a quick review of what purchase request digitization is and how it creates further productivity for your AP processes.
What is Purchase Order Automation?
Purchase order automation is the notion of using business solutions through robotic technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to digitize the purchase request process and its related undertakings.
By means of digitization, purchase requisitions may be mechanically transmitted to the fitting team to initiate the authorization procedure. After, as soon as the requisition is approved, it is instinctively sent to the vendor.
Though this may not appear to be significant at first glance, digitizing the purchasing procedure abolishes the necessity for a manual process, tangible systems, and simplifies the often laborious workflow.
For example, with purchase request software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, you can create electronic purchase requisitions that vendors can identify followed by having the information automatically fused into your accounting platform.
This presumably small capability greatly simplifies the system, drastically diminishes the requirement for by-hand intervention, and thus, improves efficiency through your Accounts Payable section.
The Benefits of AP and Purchase Order Automation
We discussed several of the benefits of AP digitization in the preceding portion, but to guarantee that you get the point, let's dissect these advantages in absolute terms.
Mechanized data logging and storage
Enhanced competence via more mechanization and less manual interference
Improved accuracy due to less human faults
Greater perceptibility into operations via automated tasks
Real-time analytics, auditing, and reporting to continue to improve efficiencies
Improved supply network and merchant connections and self-operated portal
Improved capability to monitor for protection and amenability
Since we’ve reviewed what AP and digital purchase order is, how it operates, and why it’s significant, let’s start our software assessment on Sharepoint vs M-Files.
Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review
In this section, we’re going to first take a look at a straightforward evaluation between the pricing and capabilities of SharePoint and M-Files, succeeded by an extensive review on their AP and purchase order digitization potential.
Basic Price and Features Breakdown
Although this section presents a good general side-by-side evaluation, it doesn’t tell us much about how these tools handle tasks such as purchase order automation. So in this succeeding portion, we’re going to do a synopsis of each tool and how it administers this significant operation.
Microsoft SharePoint Overview
SharePoint is amongst the most prominent and endorsed enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS platforms, because of its strong association with diverse popular Microsoft programs like Excel, Outlook, and Word.
In the context of purchase request automation, SharePoint allows you to resolve each one of the issues you might be facing with your current, physical purchase order scheme.
Order Tracking
To begin, by using Microsoft SharePoint and integrating Office 365 tools, team members could oversee purchase requisitions at any stage from request approvals to delivery.
Customization
SharePoint and Office 365 also enable your company to adapt your automated purchase order scheme to your individual guidelines and needs.
Aspects you can custom tailor within SharePoint include the layout of the purchase order forms, line items, multi-level approvals, role assignments, and filters attributed to type, payment terms, location, and more.
Communication
SharePoint and Office 365 could also promote connection across sectors. When the PO process has started, SharePoint could prompt a mechanized email to all appropriate groups to alert them that the procedure has begun and once more when it’s carried out.
Interactive Dashboards
A further significant element of automation is the clarity into productivity and workflow transparency. SharePoint enables this by permitting you to supervise purchase request progress through an interactive dashboard.
Through the dashboard setup, you can track purchase order history among divisions, distinguish the evaluation of approval vs denial percentage, and monitor the state of POs in progress.
Vigorous Integrations
Furthermore, SharePoint enables great flexibility in that it can work with with most programs between departments for improved synergy.
For instance, if a branch delivers a purchase order for a network printer; as soon as the request is handled, SharePoint can spontaneously generate an entry in your finance software for the new IT asset.
Now that we’ve discussed what SharePoint can accomplish in terms of helping you automate your AP processes, let’s proceed to M-Files.
M-Files Overview
M-Files is a vigorous enterprise content management (ECM) system that offers both on-premise, cloud solutions, or a hybrid version contingent on your organizational needs.
Its interface is based off of the Windows Explorer web engine making it easy to figure out and perform for teams that are accustomed to the Windows interface.
Furthermore, M-Files provides state-of-the-art functionality that allows businesses to automate operations and processes like purchase order automation. Let’s examine those aptitudes.
Input
With M-Files you can capture invoices from main or assigned areas and mechanize the collection of important data linked to your purchase requisition and confirmation workflows.
Data entry
In addition to the input aptitude, M-Files allows customers to distinguish and pull out details from purchase order fields to promote the automation and routing process. Moreover, M-Files enables you to input any relevant business codes, confirmation details and includes archive lookups to help ensure precision during the operation.
Matching and coding
As an advanced functionality, M-Files could execute conforming of POs and GL coding of non-PO statements in your ERP operation to simplify arrangement and delivery.
Digitized approvals
The M-Files solution can control and digitize as much of the authorization procedure as you want. This contains handling, response, queues, routing, and aging accounts. Any purchase order that fails the validation process can be revised manually and then put back into the mechanization flow for validation.
Automatic storage of approved POs
Once authorization has been issued, purchase requisitions can be sent to finance spontaneously to finalize development and storage in a main database.
How Wave Can Assist You in Enforcing Your Purchase Order Automation Solution in Bakersfield
Holding your company fierce nowadays means rationalizing your procedures and eliminating the hindrances from your workflows that work to diminish your capability and productivity. Moreover, it requires selecting the proper business solutions to complete your strategic growth aims.
At Wave, we can be of assistance by analyzing the foundational aspects of your company and through incremental digital switch-over and business workflow automation, transform them.
We use a consolidation of solutions based on your company necessities to digitize your repetitive processes around capturing, arranging, and registering data so that it's uncomplicated to track down and utilize at any time, from anywhere.
We can be of assistance in individualizing your AP digitization software to fulfill your company’s precise demands and we willingly go along with over 60 industry-recognized ECM and DMS tools including M-Files, SharePoint, OpenText, and Oracle.
If you’re ready to learn more, reach out today and we can set up a time to chat.