Customer service levels can suffer when small businesses are forced by manual processes to spend too much time on operational activities including financial management. Automating routine tasks such as book keeping and inventory management frees up staff time to focus on the core business and engage with customers.
The Small Business Conundrum
Small businesses face a conundrum every single day. Devote time and effort to financial activities or focus on customers and sales? They have to carefully manage cash flow; if they don’t keep the business’ finances in order and produce timely quotes and invoices they won’t make money. On the other hand, their passion is their core business and if they don’t serve customers well, that will suffer. Where do they put their time and effort?
The answer of course, is that good financial management and customer service are both essential. To be successful at both, businesses need to reduce the amount of time needed to manage finances. Unfortunately, many small businesses consider themselves too small for, or perhaps are just unfamiliar with, finance software. They continue to ‘make do’ with spreadsheets and other manual ways of working including producing quotes and invoices by hand.
Getting the Basics Right
This is a missed opportunity to reduce the amount of time spent on the operational side of the business. These activities are important but they don’t directly contribute to growth. Small businesses that free-up time through automation and redirect it to serving customers can reap the rewards. With the right digital accounting solution small businesses can:
Save time by automating many activities involved in book keeping, accounting, and contact and inventory management
- Have better visibility into current and forecast finances
- Avoid duplication and manual errors
- Create consistent and professional documents
- Access data and produce documents on the go
- Manage cash flow by simply reconciling invoices with incoming and outgoing payments.
