If you’re a business owner, you know maintaining a successful business is a huge job. You’re constantly thinking of ways to expand and improve your business while keeping costs low. While you could test out being open for different business hours, hiring a general office manager to oversee the day to day operations of your business for you, or trying to cut costs with suppliers, automating some of your processes already in place is one of the easiest and most cost efficient ways of helping your business grow. Business process automation is the use of technology to automate repeatable, day-to-day tasks. Using software enables your business to maximize available resources and become more efficient and productive.
Automation, while still a relatively new business integration tool, is highly valuable to business owners and employees alike, as it has several benefits all around. While automation was once a luxury, it is now a necessity. Because these tools are so readily available, not using automation can put your business at a huge disadvantage since your competitors are likely automating their processes. In the near future when nearly every avenue of a business will be optimized by automation, you’ll want to make sure your business is able to keep up with the competition. Starting the automation of some of your business processes now, before it is a standard, will give you a leg up on the competition and will save your business time and money of having to train your employees to use several different forms of automation software all at once. Automation is quickly becoming an essential strategy for business operations and the key to the long-term survival of your business. This article explores the ways automation can help streamline business processes, attain greater efficiency and minimize costs.
Benefits of Automation
One of the most important elements of automation is helping to streamline tasks and increase the efficiency of your business operations. Here are some of the key benefits you can attain by leveraging technology:
- Cost reduction – more employee hours available, enabling your business to have the same level of output with a reduced human workforce.
- Better allocation of your workforce – allows your employees to focus on more strategic work by automating repeated actions not needing human intervention as automation helps businesses avoid wasting about 22 hours per week on redundant tasks.
- Limiting human errors – eliminate the possibility of errors in business processes.
- Reliability – ensures tasks are not forgotten or run out of order and completed successfully.
- Enhanced collaboration – ensure proper flow of information to all team members
- Deeper insight into your business – provides data to give you a more thorough look at the different aspects of your business so you can identify any problem areas.
- Improve employee morale – most employees spend their time on menial tasks, which do not add much value to the business. Automation enables them to focus on more meaningful and valuable work, making employees feel valued.
Ways to Automate Your Business Processes
A process is a good candidate for automation if it is repeatable, important for consistency across the organization, needs to be error-free every time, and doesn’t require any type of human intervention. To help you understand your options, here are some of the processes you can automate to reduce the overall cost of running your business:
1. Manage Clients from a Bird’s Eye View
What if you could increase your customer pool without having to increase the number of employees you pay? Automated CRM tools make it easier to manage your client interactions and relationships. CRM software encompasses a wide range of functions and streamlines tasks including:
- Visual sales pipeline – Tracking and measuring inbound leads
- Contact management – includes a database for storing a record of contact information
- Order management – facilitates the purchase process
- Customer service – can include a customer portal or ticketing system
- Reporting – find out how you’re performing against KPIs at a granular or high-level
CRM tools are relatively inexpensive (some are even free) and allow your employees to concentrate on more strategic work.
2.Track Team Data
Workflow management automation software enables you to schedule tasks, manage employee workloads, collaborate with others, and evaluate progress. It helps you make important decisions about your business. The software gives you insight into how efficient your team is and what tasks they spend the most time performing. Workflow management tools can be used to monitor deadlines on an individual employee level or to evaluate performance on a business or team level. Data from these tools help employees be more productive by providing access to their monthly performance statistics and see where they need to improve in order to meet their goals. Business owners can use this data to mitigate risk by providing proof if you need to terminate an under performing employee.
3. Cut Down on In-House Marketing Efforts
Marketing is the lifeblood of every business because it helps build relationships with your prospective and current customers. Marketing automation is the ideal solution for streamlining your marketing workflow to increase operational efficiency and grow revenue faster. It connects multiple marketing channels including social media, email marketing, and content marketing, and reduces your spending by eliminating the need to hire more in-house marketing staff. As your business grows, maintaining a 1:1 relationship with your customers can be difficult. Managing customer relationships in Outlook, Excel or another spreadsheet software program becomes an impossible task. With marketing automation tools, you can increase personalization to help nurture your customer relationships. You can focus more on the quality of the campaigns instead of spending time on executing the tasks. Marketing automation enables you to collect information on a prospect or customer’s interests and tailor offers so they are more relevant. With automated email tools, you can automatically send out big batches of these targeted, personalized emails. Other benefits of marketing automation include:
- Collecting marketing data in one place and providing analysis
- Establishing an automated social media schedule, eliminating the need to manually post updates on all your social media channels.
- Setting up A/B testing to optimize your marketing campaigns
4. Hire Efficiently
Hiring the right employees for your business is essential to the growth of your business. However, the wrong decision can have the opposite effect. Hiring can be extremely time-consuming and costly. Automation can streamline your hiring process, making it more efficient, effective and consistent. It also shortens the time frame. Each day an open role goes unfilled, your business faces lost productivity and profitability. A lengthy process can also result in losing top talent to other businesses. By automating certain hiring tasks, you greatly reduce the overall time to hire, giving you more time to focus on more meaningful efforts such as evaluating the candidates cultural fit. Here are some ways automated tools can help transform your hiring efforts:
- Job posting – post open roles on free or low-cost online job boards along with screening questions to easily knock out candidates who are not a good fit. Examples of top job websites include Craigslist, Indeed, Monster, and Zip Recruiter. Also, use your social media channels to communicate the open role. LinkedIn is a great way to get the word out to your network about the opening.
- Screening candidates – automated screening systems scan cover letters and resumes for keywords matching the job description, further weeding out candidates before you even have to review a resume.
- Interview scheduling – Instead of wasting time going back and forth on email trying to schedule candidate interviews, automation saves time, streamlines the interviewing process and creates a better candidate experience.
- Candidate communication – use automated emails to communicate the status of the hiring process. You can let them know if they are still under consideration or have been eliminated.
- Background checks – after interviewing and selecting top candidates, it’s important to conduct a background check to ensure candidates were truthful about their education, criminal history and driving record. While manual background checks can take up to two weeks, automated background checks easily batch process the candidates you’ve selected to bring on to your team in minutes, confirming the information the candidate provided.
Hiring efficiently with the use of automation can help save you time and money. The wrong hire costs approximately six to nine months of the employee’s salary.
5. Expand outreach
Automation software can help widen your reach to your target market:
- Social media automation: increase engagement with customers and prospects on social media by scheduling and publishing your posts during peak audience times
- Phone calls: having an automated phone system to help direct customers to the appropriate department can save employees time on answering phones, leaving them more time for important tasks. In addition, an automated phone system can process customer requests even when you are out of the office.
- Chatbots: an automated chatbot on your site will help potential customers or clients navigate your site with ease 24/7 and respond to customer inquiries instantly eliminating the need for customers to wait for a response.
Automating your outreach efforts save your employees’ time by allowing them to focus on more meaningful tasks and can cost much less than hiring a full-time outreach employee.
6. Automate Payroll Functions
According to the American Payroll Association, automating payroll tasks reduces costs as much as 80% by reducing errors in invoices and paychecks. Automation can also help you cut down on printing costs as paychecks can be automatically deposited in the employee’s bank account and they can check their employees their payment information online. Among the payroll functions you can automate by leveraging technology are:
- Timekeeping – system tracks hours and ensures hourly workers are paid accurately. Time clock data can be automatically imported into the time tracking system.
- Payment calculations:performs all types of payments including hourly, overtime, bonuses, raises and retroactive pay. The system automatically generates paychecks and stubs and enables direct deposit.
- Deduction calculations: tax rates hard-coded in the system so withholding tax for each employee is determined based on the data.
- Recordkeeping: The IRS requires employers to keep employment tax records for a minimum of four years and the U.S. Department of Labor requires payroll records to be kept at least three years. The payroll system can store the data.
While cutting costs is one main reason for automating payroll tasks, there are other important benefits including:
- Help business comply with regulatory responsibilities and avoid costly penalties.
- Ensure employees are paid accurately and timely, averting any legal ramifications for late or incorrect paychecks.
- Simplify the collection of necessary data.
- Instantly transfer information to linked systems.
- Mitigates business risk by preventing costly errors.
- Stay abreast of tax changes with automatic updates to tax tables. Tax tables are automatically updated.
- Makes the payroll process simpler with a user-friendly interface, which is easy to read for those employees with no prior training in accounting.
- Enable employees to focus on other tasks requiring human intervention.
In addition to reducing costs and limiting human errors, automating payroll functions ensures the daily, weekly, semi-monthly, and monthly time tracking and payroll processing tasks are completed quickly and accurately.
Tips for Managing Your Small Business Finance
It must have been exhilarating to quit that monotonous job and to decide to start something of your own. The mere thought of being your own boss must have excited you to the core. But what you must not be aware of before starting your own business was financial management. We hit home. Didn’t we? Being the owner of a small business is no breeze. It comes with a lot of challenges. It is all about being responsible and taking charge of your company’s financial situation. Financial management for small business owners does not come easy. While you are launching a new business, the thing you have to take care of is saving up sufficient capital for all your expenses. Along with aiming to achieve this, you are also required to find proper start-up funding before turning a profit. To ensure your leap into entrepreneurship is realistic as well as secure, take your time to prepare for your company’s finances.
If you are not among those people who have the knack for financial responsibility, we present to you simple hacks and tips that can aid you in running your business efficiently. Check them out.
1. Avoid Expensive Credit:
Establishing business goals is the first and foremost thing you need to do to build a successful portfolio. No matter you have an established business, or you are just setting up a start up, optimizing the funds is the key to success.
You must be aware of the fact that the cost of credit plays a critical role in the growing period of the business. Therefore it is essential that you set up your interest core at a bare minimum price and reduce cost and attain profitability earlier. Plunging into details of financial management tips, we recommend you read further to get a more vivid idea about the whole thing.
2. Don’t Mix Business and Personal Expenses:
It is natural to feel all emotional and connected to your own business. But, what is not right is to mix up your personal business accounting records. It seems just perfect until you have to calculate your company’s valuation and fill taxes. Mixing up tends to create a burden for your personal accounts when your business is losing money.
Holding a borderline between the finances, both personal and financial, tend to offer you with a more straightforward accounting for tax ascertainment purposes.
3. Pay yourself:
When you are running your own business, it becomes your responsibility of handling every day-to-day operation with utmost efficacy. While you are taking care of all the things so efficiently, you cannot overlook your own role in the company. You need to ensure that your finances are in good shape as well, along with all your employees.
4. Invest in the Growth of the Company:
You should always look out for growth opportunities. Working in the same monotony tends to make your growth stagnant. To give your business a healthy financial direction, it is essential that you keep looking for whatever growth aspects you find. This is one of the vital tips you’ll get to hear regarding financial management.
5. Consider the Insurance:
No matter how much you loathe paying insurance, deep inside your hearts, you know you need it for managing small business finances. Insurance provides your dependents with much needed financial security. Your old parents or children who are relying on you need all the protection that they can get. If we ever talk about financial management for small business owners, the most talked-about would be insurance-related issues. Therefore, you have to be really cautious regarding them.
A.) Monitor your Books:
As apparent as this practice is, even the best of us fail to adopt this. It is recommended you set aside time once every month to know your books in a better way. This would enable you to become familiar with the finances of your business. If you are looking for a window into potential financial crime, books are a perfect solution.
B.) Save for Retirement:
Life after retirement can be pretty daunting, especially if you have no funds. The dreams of retirement people see can be surreal at times, and they can only be lived if you have sufficient money saved for you. They say, “Save it all for a rainy day,” and they say it rightly. There is something about owning your own business; you can never be sure of the earnings. You might feel that your business is flourishing now, but you never know when it starts underperforming in the future. Therefore it becomes more of a necessity than a choice to contribute to your retirement savings.
C.) Set up Good Financial Habits:
If you wish to protect the financial health of your business, establishing internal financial protocols becomes sort of necessary. Small baby steps such as blocking outset time to review and update financial information can make your business a long way. This is one of the most effective financial management tips you’ll ever hear.
D.) Hire an Excellent Team of Experts:
Handing all spheres of the business on your own is an impossible task. It can be pretty overwhelming and ineffective too. Playing Jack of all trade won’t take you anywhere, instead put you in a messier situation. It is recommended you look for competent experts who can help you in handling your company.
E.) Invest in Technology:
You can never go wrong with technology when it comes to an understanding of all the terms related to your business. Using online software for keeping the records of your finances and accounts is a valid path to tread upon. This would also help you in establishing an online presence.
F.) Diversify your Investments:
Investing all of your assets into business is a risk you wouldn’t want to take. Investing outside of your industry tends to protect your startup’s performance when the market changes and your sector go down. This is one of the most useful financial management tips. You can adapt to your life.
a. Plan ahead:
Immediate addressing of business issues becomes essential when you are running your own business. But, when it comes to financial management, it is always better to plan for the future. If you don’t look five to ten years ahead, there are chances that your business might lag.
b. Keep Traveling Costs Minimal:
When you are running your own business, there are certain things that you have to be careful about. And minimizing the cost is the most important of them all. Reduce as much hotel and travel costs as you can, while out on business meetings. Avoid overspending on luxurious traveling and accommodation.
c. Don’t let Catastrophe bum you out:
While you are out there, taking the most significant risk of your life, you must know that there would be your ups and downs. Downs more than ups, most of the time. Your partners are going to let you down, customers will desert you, and the systems would fail. But what is important is the fact that you avoid letting this to happen. We know the problems are inevitable, when in business, but we can do our best to prevent them.
d. Design an Emergency Fund:
To ensure the success of your business entity, you need to design an emergency fund. But, before rushing into anything, make sure that you understand the importance of negotiating the prices from vendors. Both of these methods would allow you to manage your business finances incredibly. Planning for off-season funds would enable your company to create a steady flow of income. In order to design an emergency fund, you are required to develop a proportion of income in months off high-sales. This would help you to fulfill your expenses in the off-months.
e. Debt Reduction:
In order to achieve financial management for small business owners, making the debt reduction a priority is essential. Too much debt tends to create stress and jeopardize your credit rating. In case you are under bad debt, you are sure to struggle while making parents. It is recommended you do not carry liabilities year after year or else you’ll portray a weak financial position to potential stakeholders.
f. Monitor and Measure Performance:
Keeping tabs on the movement of your money should come naturally to you while you own a business. Keep monitoring your company’s financial performance. Compare it to the past financial statements. This would allow you to project your cash flow, expenses, and future revenue.
In a Nutshell: Running your startup can be exciting at times. The small businesses that you own tend to flourish even more if you follow the right tricks and hacks. The more carefully you pay attention to your business finances and cash flow, the better prepared you’ll be to make smart money management decisions. Keep in mind that managing the cash flow is sometimes more important than earning profit from the business. If you wish your business to run without a halt, you must keep a sharp eye on the cash flow.
Infographic created by Donnelley Financial Solutions, an SEC reporting software company
Summary
Being a business owner can be overwhelming at times. However, using automation in your business is the perfect way to optimize your processes while saving hundreds if not thousands of dollars. If implemented correctly, automation can help increase efficiency, accuracy and transparency of your business processes. If you felt unsure about automation before, this article should serve as a starting point for you to see that automation is a fairly easy and hugely useful tool when looking for ways to improve your business processes. Use the information in this article as your guide to review the different types of automation you can implement to help you when deciding which business processes to automate.