Key Areas to Automate in Your Business

Automation is no longer limited to high-volume tasks or large, established businesses. It is rapidly becoming one of the critical practices for helping small businesses and startups streamline operations that result in a positive impact to the bottom line.

Automation to the Rescue

Automation is an essential component to ensuring business continuity. When a business is faced with a crisis that may include human resources being impacted, a well thought-out automation plan can maintain business continuity through diligent back-up, continued tracking, and reliable reporting.

One advantage of incorporating automation into any business is that most often it is not prohibitively expensive, nor does it require huge investments in time, effort or infrastructure. When planned appropriately, automation brings reliability, speed, and reduction in errors, effectively streamlining operations and ensuring optimal utilization of resources across all levels of the business.

Here are some key business areas that can be automated to achieve productivity and streamlined operations:

• Accounting and Financial Processes
  Business accounting can greatly benefit from automation. Essential bookkeeping functions of recording transactions and processes, such as tracking bills, payments, and invoices, can be automated successfully to ensure timely settlement of payments without the loss of interest income for the business. Furthermore, these are time-intensive tasks and automating them allows significant manpower to be freed up for other important business development work.
• Analytics and Reporting
  Reporting brings information and data together in a consolidated, cohesive manner. Data that is organized and free from duplication and other leads to better business decision-making.  Presentation of data can be customized also. Automation software often possesses features that help create reports with data visualization. This enables data to be presented in the form of graphs and charts, thus also reducing time and effort that would otherwise be engaged in scrutinizing data in numeric form.
• Business Management and Operations
  Businesses that seek rapid growth require streamlined operations. Automation helps provide better tracking features for tasks that would otherwise need diligent follow-up by human resources.  Tasks involving data entry and scheduling, monitoring of schedules, tracking schedules of workers and their job responsibilities, etc. are made more efficient, timely, and free from error when automated.
• Marketing and Digital Marketing
  Automation technology can help businesses with critical operations such as lead capture and inbound marketing efforts. Regardless of business size, automation technology can be leveraged to boost digital marketing efforts by complementing existing resources and infrastructure or establishing a new set-up. Again, depending on business budget and requirements, this can help free up human resources for critical business development work.

Automating Your Business Functions

Even with the benefits that automation brings to a business, the efforts of introducing new software and laying the foundation for it to be adopted can prove to be draining, especially for a small business. One way to address this challenge is to outsource the automation to a proven vendor or provider of automation services.

Once you have identified which specific business areas can benefit from automation, conduct some research on outsourced providers of the services.  Evaluate client testimonials and gain as much information on them as you can.  Ideally, once you narrow down the options, ask some candidates for the option of a trial to help gain a first-hand look at their offerings.

Analytix Solutions offers customized solutions for businesses that range from accounting and bookkeeping to more complex requirements including business management. For more information on how we can assist your needs, call us at 781-503-9004 or email us at sales@analytix.com.

Written by

Analytix Editorial Team