SharePoint vs M-Files: The Tool For AP Efficiency & Purchase Order Automation in Anchorage

Developing competencies in your business operations is a pivotal first phase toward digital transformation, back-office upgrading, and giving your organization an edge in a growingly cutthroat professional landscape.

Paper-based operations and fragmented processes with logjams make synergy, productivity, visibility, and accountability to stakeholders notably difficult.

Through accounts payable automation, you can achieve cloud-based arrangements into your organization and expedite workflows like purchase orders, invoicing, payment processing, procurement, and data input processes.

Digitizing these forms of company operations creates more efficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), higher cost reductions, and improved employment of your manpower.

Included in this manual, we’re examining two of the most famous solutions geared toward AP efficiency and purchase request digitization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our objective is to assist you in selecting the appropriate toolset and collaborate so you could expand and expedite your AP digital revamping.

But prior to beginning our product analysis, let’s discuss what purchase order mechanization is and how it generates further capability for your AP workflows.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the process of using business tools with artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotic technology to automate the purchase requisition system and its related workflows.

Through automation, purchase requisitions may be mechanically sent to the fitting party to start the approval routine. Later, as soon as the order is approved, it is mechanically transmitted to the vendor.

While this may not appear to be significant at first glance, automating the purchasing procedure removes the need for a physical process, paper-based systems, and simplifies the usual laborious workflow.

As an example, with purchase request software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, you can develop digital purchase requisitions that suppliers can identify and then have the details mechanically fused into your accounting tool.

This seemingly small aptitude substantially streamlines the workflow, drastically reduces the requirement for by-hand intervention, and therefore, enhances productivity within your Accounts Payable department.

The Benefits of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We covered various of the gains of AP digitization in the previous section, but to be certain that you get the idea, let's take these advantages apart in absolute terms.

• Automated data entry and storage

• Improved productivity via further automation and less human interference

• Enhanced precision on account of less manual blunders

• Greater visibility into procedures with your automated tasks

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

• Improved distribution process and merchant connections and self-service portal

• Improved aptitude to regulate for security and amenability

Now that we’ve gone over what AP and purchase order automation is, how it works, and why it’s important, let’s get into our platform review on Sharepoint versus M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

Within this section, we’re examining a basic analysis between the pricing and aptitudes of SharePoint and M-Files, succeeded by an in-depth analysis on their AP and purchase order mechanization potential.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

Although this portion gives a decent conventional neck-and-neck analogy, it doesn’t tell us much about how these solutions administer tasks like electronic purchase order. Thus in this following portion, we’re giving an overview of each solution and how it administers this significant task.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is one of the most widely known and established enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS tools, owing to its close relation to different popular Microsoft tools like Word, Excel, and Outlook.

In the context of purchase requisition mechanization, SharePoint allows you to resolve the entirety of concerns you could be confronting with your present-day, manual purchase order scheme.

Order Tracking

To start, by using Microsoft SharePoint and incorporating Office 365 programs, personnel can track purchase requests at all phase from request authorizations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also empower your business to customize your automated purchase order scheme to your particular directions and requirements.

Components you could custom tailor within SharePoint comprise of the layout of the purchase request forms, line items, multi-level approvals, role assignments, and filters attributed to type, payment terms, location, and more.

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 can also further correspondence among sectors. When the PO process has started, SharePoint may trigger a programmed email to all appropriate groups to inform them that the operation has commenced and again once it’s complete.

Interactive Dashboards

One more critical aspect of digitization is the clarity into capability and workflow transparency. SharePoint enables this by authorizing you to supervise purchase requisition progress via an interactive dashboard.

Through the dashboard framework, you can track purchase request history throughout sections, see the breakdown of approval vs denial ratio, and follow the status of ongoing POs.

Robust Integrations

Furthermore, SharePoint enables superb versatility in that it can incorporate with most solutions between departments for improved collaboration.

For instance, if a division delivers a purchase order for a network printer; once the request is processed, SharePoint can automatically develop an entry in your finance tool for the new IT resource.

Now that we’ve seen what SharePoint can accomplish in terms of aiding you in digitizing your AP processes, let’s move on to M-Files.

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a robust enterprise content management (ECM) solution that presents both on-premise, cloud solutions, or a hybrid version determined by your company demands.

Its interface is based off of the Windows Explorer internet browser making it easy to understand and execute for teams that are accustomed to the Windows ecosystem.

Additionally, M-Files grants state-of-the-art functionality that empowers organizations 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 digitize the collection of significant data related to your purchase requisition and approval processes.

Data entry

In addition to the input capability, M-Files allows users to identify and extract details from purchase requisition domains to facilitate the digitization and conveying process. Moreover, M-Files enables you to input any relevant company regulations, validation details and contains database lookups to assist in guaranteeing accuracy throughout the process.

Matching and coding

As a cutting-edge functional scope, M-Files can carry out conforming of POs and GL coding of non-PO statements in your ERP procedure to streamline arrangement and routing.

Automated approvals

The M-Files platform can control and automate as much of the approval workflow as you want. This contains handling, routing, response, queues, and aging records. Any purchase order that flunks the validation procedure can be amended manually and then put back into the mechanization flow for validation.

Automatic storage of approved POs

As soon as approval has been granted, purchase requisitions can be forwarded to finance automatically to finalize handling and storage in a central repository.

How Wave Can Help You Implement Your Purchase Order Automation Tool in Anchorage

Holding your business cutthroat nowadays means streamlining your operations and uprooting the impasses from your undertakings that work to diminish your capability and output. It also means picking the proper business systems to achieve your calculated growth goals.

At Wave, we can help by analyzing the fundamental aspects of your business and via gradual digital transformation and company process automation, reform them.

We apply a combination of solutions in accordance with your organizational requirements to mechanize your repetitive tasks around collecting, arranging, and filing data so that it's simple to find and use whenever, from any location.

We can be of assistance in individualizing your AP mechanization software to satisfy your business's precise demands and we gladly work with upwards of 60 industry-accepted ECM and DMS tools including OpenText, M-Files, SharePoint, and Oracle.

If you’re ready to learn more, reach out today and we can set up a time to chat.