Recently At Aufait, Using SharePoint Online solution, we automated some of our key process connected with Finance department to help them to get the complete visibility on what’s going on with the delivery team and other departments. As a result, we have created a Finance Management System on SharePoint online where you can easily track all the tasks undergoing in the finance department which might benefit other organisations.
In this blog, we thought of sharing how SharePoint online helped our finance department in assisting some of the functions such as accounting, tracking, reporting, financial management etc. Earlier, it was a very difficult task for the finance team to cope up with the workflow in our organisation using Excel sheets. Every new assignment leads to a creation of new such sheets making it nearly impossible to deal with multiple projects. So, we decided to design a new tool with few automated features where all the relevant details regarding the new projects such as raising invoices, milestone completion. This Finance Management tool turned out to be very effective in managing the workflow and increasing the output.
The Finance Management tool consists of 3 essential modules which makes them fully operational:
1. Project & Milestone Module:
Whenever a new project is won, Either Delivery team or Sales team can create a new project by assigning details related to the new project where all related stakeholders get notified. An approval workflow is also incorporated for the necessary management team to approve.
Project Milestones with tentative dates are very important for finance team to predict the revenue and cash. This will greatly help in timely delivery as all stakeholders can track the project milestone status. 
2. Central PO Repository: The purchase document and offer letter are uploaded to the system along with the details regarding various completion stages of the projects (milestone) such as PO date, project and AMC value along with PO amount. This will later help to get them searched and filtered for reports.
3. Invoice Raising for Milestone: This module will only be available if all the above are completed and successfully approved. The system automatically raises invoices once every stage is completed. This is a fully automated process as the system is aware of the due dates for each and every project. The final invoice will be having all the details regarding the project.
In short, some of the key advantages of deploying this system are:
• Centralized Document Repository: A central system for storing all your project, finance documents along with P.O (Purchase Order) and invoices.
• Invoice Generation: The system will give flexibility to the project manager to raise the invoice once the project gets completed. The project team will also be notified once a milestone or any particular phase gets initiated and accomplished.
• Search Optimization: Search is made simpler and finance department benefits the most in this case as they can easily verify the documents.
• Milestone Tracking: Flexibility in tracking every milestone and raising the invoice accordingly without giving any manual efforts.
Overall, This Finance Management System is currently an easily manageable and user-friendly system that greatly help in increasing the productivity of finance department in any organisation.
Microsoft recently started the rollout of updated Communication Sites in Office 365. This new template is currently available for First Release tenants. Once the communication sites are enabled, you get a new option where you can choose the type of website you want to create.
Choosing between a Team Site and a Communication Site should begin with your purpose and desired business results. Despite the fact that there are more areas to explore, at the most basic, consider these two utilize cases:
- Associate, Collaborate, Create: Team site is the best option to go for, When you need to design a place where the individuals from a workgroup or project team can team up on project deliverables, plan an event, track status, and exchange ideas. In a Team Site, all individuals are content creators where they mutually make and alter content. Consider team sites as a place where work gets done. For instance, suppose you are working on a project and you along with your colleagues require a place to work together on deliverables, manage and assign tasks and have discussions regarding the work. Even though everyone has individual assignments, working together create more assets. Considering all the above mentions the project team need a Team Site rather than Communication Sites.
- Showcase, Share Services, Story: Communication Site is best suited, when you need to “communicate” a message, convey a story, share content for review (however not altering), and exhibit administrations. In a Communication Site, there will regularly be a few number of content authors and a larger number of content readers and users. Consider your corporate intranet. Even if you have collaborative parts of the intranet, the basic role of your intranet is to communicate a story like corporate news, showcase services and data such as your benefits and policies. Your intranet sites are the best example of Communication Sites.
When would it be a good idea for you to create a Team Site?
Create a Team Site for each discrete group of individuals or unit of work:
If you are a long time user of SharePoint, you may feel team site is just like sub-sites. Resist the impulse to create team sites as sub-sites. Numerous administration choices (for instance, the capacity to share content outside the organization and who has the authorization to welcome new individuals to the group) are scoped to the site collection. For the most adaptability both today and in the future, each group ought to get their own particular site collection—which is precisely what happens now when you create a Team Site in Office 365. Your Team Site is associated with an Office 365 Group and is developed as a new site collection in your occupant. In case you have a lot of projects and work teams and partners, you will probably have different access and information management requirements. You will probably need to create a unique team site for each and every project regardless of the possibility that the same work team works on every project.
SharePoint Home unites all your sites:
Don’t be concerned about how your clients will keep the track of all these team sites —because SharePoint home has your back! The SharePoint homepage in Office 365 unites, for every distinct individual, news from the team sites they are following, in addition to sites they visit frequently, are following, and also sites proposed by the Microsoft Graph.
When would it be a good idea for you to create a Communication Site?
Create a Communication Site to feature a service, showcase, relate a story:
Communication Sites offers an awesome way to feature the services of your group and recount a story regarding the launch of a new product. Even if you are equipped with a highly organized intranet based on SharePoint publishing framework, you might need to utilize a Communication Site for creating new scenarios like a companywide program, a new initiative and training site. Latest Communication Sites are ideal for your governance delivery environment since they have a unique purpose which can likely live without your intranet branding (since you can’t do much customization with them yet). You can connect them to the intranet global navigation with a link to and fro to the intranet from the best navigation of the Governance Site.
Communication Sites have 2 particular client personas:
Regularly, a Communication Site has modest number individuals who have permission to author content and much more people who just have permission to read the content.
This guide helps you choose which type of site to create that would remain helpful to create supportive, helpful to your enterprise as both Communication and Team sites are evolving. The best way to keep the track of these changes is by following the SharePoint blogs in Aufait. Aufait offers SharePoint applications depending upon your requirements and could do equity to your thoughts and upgrade your business solutions.
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