SharePoint vs M-Files: The Solution For AP Proficiency & Purchase Order Automation in Mesa

Developing efficiencies in your business operations is a crucial first step toward digital conversion, back-office upgrading, and supplying your organization an upper hand in a progressively aggressive professional sector.

Tangible systems and fragmented systems with impasses make cooperation, productivity, perceptibility, and accountability to partners notably complex.

Through accounts payable automation, you could achieve cloud-based systems into your business and streamline duties like purchase requests, payment processing, procurement, invoicing, and data entry workflows.

Mechanizing these kinds of company operations creates more proficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), greater cost savings, and reformed utilization of your human resources.

Within this manual, we’re reviewing a couple of the most prevalent solutions geared toward AP proficiency and purchase order mechanization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our goal is to aid you in selecting the proper toolset and collaborate so you may augment and accelerate your AP digital transformation.

But before we begin with our product analysis, let’s do a quick review of what purchase requisition digitization is and how it creates further productivity for your AP workflows.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the concept of employing business solutions through robotic technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to digitize the purchase requisition system and its corresponding undertakings.

Via digitization, purchase requisitions may be mechanically sent to the appropriate team to begin the approval procedure. Later, once the order is confirmed, it is instinctively sent to the vendor.

Although this may not appear to be significant at first glance, automating the buying process abolishes the necessity for a manual process, materialized schemes, and expedites the standard time-consuming workflow.

For instance, with purchase order software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool, you can develop automated purchase requests that vendors can identify at which point the information automatically fused into your accounting platform.

This superficially small capability significantly streamlines the workflow, dramatically lessens the need for by-hand meddling, and thus, enhances efficiency through your Accounts Payable section.

The Benefits of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We talked about various of the benefits of AP automation in the previous section, but to guarantee that you understand, let's break these benefits down in plain language.

• Digitized data input and storage

• Greater efficiency through extra digitization and less manual interference

• Improved precision due to less human faults

• Increased transparency into systems through your digitized workflows

• Current-time analytics, auditing, and reporting to sustain the betterment of efficiencies

• Reformed distribution process and supplier affinities and self-operated portal

• Greater capability to regulate for security and amenability

Now that we’ve reviewed what AP and purchase order automation is, how it works, and why it’s significant, let’s start our product assessment 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 rate 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 section gives a good standard simultaneous comparison, it doesn’t educate us on how these solutions administer tasks like purchase order automation. Therefore in this next chapter, we’re giving an overview of each solution and how it handles this significant task.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is amongst the most recognized and accepted enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS platforms, due to its strong association with diverse famed Microsoft programs like Word, Excel, and Outlook.

As it relates to purchase order mechanization, SharePoint allows you to address each one of the problems you might be facing with your present-day, physical purchase request system.

Order Tracking

To initiate, by utilizing Microsoft SharePoint and combining Office 365 tools, personnel can monitor purchase orders at any phase from request authorizations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also enable your business to customize your automated purchase order system to your particular instructions and requirements.

Components you can individualize within SharePoint include the format of the purchase requisition forms, role assignments, line items, multi-level approvals, and filters attributed to payment terms, location, type, and more.

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 could also facilitate correspondence among sectors. When the PO process has begun, SharePoint can prompt an automated email to all appropriate groups to notify them that the process has commenced and once more when it’s carried out.

Interactive Dashboards

Another significant aspect of digitization is the foresight into efficiency and workflow visibility. SharePoint enables this by allowing you to supervise purchase order progress via an interactive dashboard.

Through the dashboard system, you can monitor purchase order history across divisions, distinguish the breakdown of approval vs denial percentage, and track the status of POs in progress.

Robust Integrations

SharePoint also enables superb adaptability in that it can integrate with most programs among departments for increased collaboration.

For instance, if a branch presents a purchase requisition for a network printer; when the request is actioned, SharePoint can mechanically produce an entry in your finance tool for the new IT resource.

Now that we’ve seen what SharePoint can do in terms of aiding you in digitizing your AP tasks, let’s continue to M-Files.

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a powerful enterprise content management (ECM) solution that provides both on-site, cloud solutions, or a hybrid adaptation depending on your company requirements.

Its interface is derived from the Windows Explorer web browser making it convenient to understand and implement for parties that are accustomed to the Windows ecosystem.

Additionally, M-Files grants state-of-the-art functionality that empowers organizations to automate tasks and processes like purchase requisition automation. Let’s study those capabilities.

Input

With M-Files you could capture invoices from primary or distributed sites and mechanize the ingestion of essential data linked to your purchase requisition and confirmation processes.

Data entry

In addition to the input aptitude, M-Files allows clients to distinguish and extract details from purchase request areas to expedite the mechanization and transmission process. Additionally, M-Files permits you to input any relevant business codes, approval specifications and incorporates directory searches to assist in guaranteeing veracity across the operation.

Matching and coding

As a state-of-the-art functional scope, M-Files could carry out corresponding of POs and GL coding of non-PO statements in your ERP procedure to facilitate structure and routing.

Mechanized approvals

The M-Files system can regulate and automate as much of the approval process as you wish. This involves overseeing, response, queues, routing, and aging accounts. Any purchase request that fails the authorization process can be corrected by hand and then reinstated into the mechanization flow for approval.

Automatic storage of approved POs

As soon as authorization has been accepted, purchase requests can be transmitted to finance automatically to wrap up handling and storage in a main cache.

How Wave Can Assist You in Enforcing Your Purchase Order Automation Platform in Mesa

Holding your organization fierce today means simplifying your operations and eliminating the impasses from your workflows that work to diminish your capability and output. It also involves selecting the appropriate business solutions to complete your tactical growth goals.

At Wave, we can help by examining the fundamental elements of your company and with incremental digital transformation and organizational process automation, transform them.

We utilize a combination of innovations based on your organizational needs to automate your laborious tasks around gathering, arranging, and cataloging data so that it's uncomplicated to find and access at any time, from anywhere.

We can be of assistance in individualizing your AP automation software to fit your business's particular needs and we willingly collaborate with more than 60 industry-accepted ECM and DMS platforms 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.