Business First Family Business, Accounting, Finance, Investing, Marketing And Management
Are there hang ups throughout your business workflow that slow things down and generally make life more difficult? These are the tasks you just hate doing–ones that slow you down and interfere with your productivity. So why not automate them?
Automating workflows can be beneficial for your business, saving time and money, and generally making things more efficient. Automating can be a strategic decision for your business, taking tasks off your plate and keeping you free to devote your time to larger, more important tasks. When you use the right business management software, you will save plenty of time and work on the business more efficiently. Automation may not be right for every business, but if you can automate just a few tasks, it can result in significant savings in the long run.
Automation Tools Help With A Variety of Tasks
It’s time to stop thinking about streamlining your business, and start doing it. There are a variety of automation tools on the market to help automate your workflow and give you time back in your day. Here are a few of the best ones on the market currently.
Accounting Software–easily track business expenses, see reporting and automate your taxes. The program allows users to see everything in one place, saving time.
Chat Software–synthesize your company’s communication efforts all in one place. Create channels for specific projects and track team efforts easily.
Email Marketing Senders–this type of tool has revolutionized email marketing. Businesses can easily craft messages and send them to entire mailing lists in a few clicks.
B2B Sales Databases–for businesses with a sales focus, finding quality B2B lead generation can be challenging. This program relies on Artificial Intelligence to match leads to your business. This means your leads are those who would most want to hear from your business, saving you time on sales calls.
Project Management Platforms–stay ahead of upcoming tasks. Plan, manage, and monitor work across the entire organization. Your entire company can more easily hit goals with a project and task manager on their side.
Payroll Systems–this software allows for complete automation of payroll. Support staff is there to handle all regulations to ensure compliance, and answer any questions users have.
Social Scheduluer–this tool is key for organizations using a variety of social media accounts. Aggregate all of your social media content in one place and assign out specific tasks to members of your social media team. Think of a scheduler as a one-stop-shop for social media.
Benefits of Automation For Business
When multiple people are responsible for performing certain tasks, there is always the risk of human error. Work can get delayed or there can be a lack of communication. Automating tasks offers small and large businesses alike a variety of benefits.
Streamline processes–by reducing the need for manual entry, you can streamline and even speed up various processes across the organization.
Reduce errors–to piggyback off the previous point, when you eliminate manual entry, you reduce the chance of error and the need for rework. If you’re looking for expenses, for example, employees may turn in receipts instead of spreadsheets, or sloppy documentation which then has to be inputted manually. The probability of errors is high. Relying less on manual processes reduces that probability and ensures that the process is done properly.
Speeding up deliverables–when you implement business automation on various processes, you are not waiting on staff to perform tasks, or relying on the accuracy of the information. You can even automate the task of sending items directly to the client, eliminating the back and forth exchange.
Identify areas of redundancy–analyzing your current workflow can identify bottlenecks or areas of redundancy that can stand to be automated. This can help create consistency across processes.
Improve communication and accountability–workflow automation makes communication easier by housing everything in a single location. Programs such allow for tracking and commenting on individual tasks, as well as planning and account management.
If you’re not sure where to begin the automation process, you can find a variety of helpful app demo videos that can help with getting the process started. If you’re thinking of integrating a particular app into your workflow process, these videos can be helpful for explaining the new software to members of the team.