Are You Automating your business processes? Some top web resources to watch

Many small business owners dream of more free time, more income, and a well-oiled machine. Unfortunately, running a business can many times turn out to be more demanding on your time than working a desk job. When you’re an employee, you have clear hours and tasks. As a business owner, you may be spending all hours of the day tending to your business, whether it’s keeping employees on track, following up with clients, and making sure nothing slips through the cracks. Stepping away from your business sounds disastrous.

By Erika Rykun

What if I told you there are tons of resources and tools that will streamline your workflow, automate some of the most tedious business tasks, and give you some much needed free time, while potentially increasing your revenue stream? When your workflow moves faster and more efficiently, you’ll be able to satisfy more clients, take on bigger projects, and rest a bit easier.

Automating your business processes

In this article, I’m going to highlight some of the best tools for automating your business processes and point you towards highly valuable resources with the goal of business process automation in mind. But don’t simply take our word for it, let’s first examine some statistics.

• 96% of companies in 2015 utilized documented processes [2015 BPTrends survey]
• Only 4% measure and manage business processes after documentation [2016 survey]
• Efficient BPMs can increase project success by 70% [Gartner study]

Let’s take business documents as our first example. A business has to keep track of many different types of documents, including employee contracts, non-disclosure agreements, project agreements, and more.

According to research from Coopers and Lybrand, 15% of all paper documents are either misfiled or misplaced. Time is then wasted finding these documents, which can cost up to six times the actual value of the document – or up to eleven times the value of the document if it needs to be redone.

So why not go digital?

Business Process vs Workflow Management & Automation

Throughout this article, we are going to include tips for automating workflow management software. While workflow management is not exactly the same as business process management, it is a subdomain of business process management. Workflow automation is typically used by companies to streamline the business process, especially in repetitive tasks. Thus, automation and increased efficiency in workflow management lend toward the end-goal of increased efficiency in business process management. Essentially, they go hand-in-hand.

What sort of workflow processes can be automated?

• Email-related activity: “Inbox zero” sounds wonderful, but can be elusive. There are many tools and tricks to manage your inbox much better, such as filter-based labels, automatic responses, customizable email templates, and outsourcing email management to a virtual assistant.
• Appointment scheduling: There are many appointment scheduling apps available, which can prove invaluable to someone who needs to constantly check their calendar for schedule availability. In most of the apps, you simply specify which days and hours you are available for appointments, and your clients a date most convenient for them.
• Automatic recurring invoices and business transactions: It’s really quite easy to set up automatic recurring invoices that are sent out to your clients on the days you specify. You can download or create many document template forms, like invoices or NDAs, have them automatically sent to the recipient, and if a signature is required, the recipient can provide an e-signature.

These are just a few examples of workflow automation. You should evaluate what tasks your employees perform throughout the day that are repetitive, and can be replaced (or enhanced) with automation. However, the point is not really to replace your employees with automation – you need a human buffer in case of a software error.

For automating workflows, you should generally follow these guidelines.

1. Evaluate work tasks for repetition.
2. Break those tasks down into repeatable steps.
3. Research what tools are available that can automate those steps.

Automation for popular workflow management software

If you have a team of employees that focus on individual or team-based projects, a workflow management system is incredibly beneficial. Some popular software for workflow management includes Trello, Wrike, Asana, and others. The project manager typically creates tile-based tasks and assigns them to an individual team member.

As the team members work on the assigned tasks, they can move tasks into various stages such as “In Progress”, “Delayed”, “Finished”, etc. This is the basis of these apps – they are generally customizable, and some offer more features than what we’ve just described.

Where automation comes into play here is when you use third-party plug-ins, such as Zapier. Because project management tools have external APIs, you can use plugins to create API hooks, and allow different project management tools (or other software) to communicate with each other.

For example, let’s say your team uses Trello for task flow management, and Slack for team communication. If you connect your Trello and Slack accounts to Zapier, you can create an API hook that, if a new task is assigned to a team member, a message is automatically sent to that person in Slack. And another API hook to message you when the worker moves the task to “In Progress”, or “Completed”.

Zapier supports most of the major project management tools, and other work-related platforms, so your scripts can become as complex as you’d like.

Variable recurring invoice management

Recurring invoices are a great time-saver, but most businesses would use them for fixed rate invoices. However, it’s not difficult at all to automate variable rate invoices.

There are a few platforms which can help. For example, the cloud-based project management software Podio. It supports RegEx, PHP, Perl, Lua, and other programming languages for writing automated scripts. Thus, if you’re a proficient coder, or have coders on your team, you can actually turn Podio into a highly efficient software, customized to do exactly what you want.

For example, let’s say you’re a translation agency that bills your client monthly, based on how many words your team translated per month. So each month, you would need to pool together all the finished translations from your team, come up with a total, and send this amount to your client.

Instead of doing this manually, you could, in fact, use an online spreadsheet, like Google Sheets or Smartsheet. You can pool together all the translated documents into a cell, have the total word count calculated by Google Sheets, and automatically sent to your invoicing software via external API. You could even include a script to calculate VAT.

Erika Rykun

Erika is an independent copywriter and content creator who believes in the power of networking.

Talent activation and what you should be doing about it https://t.co/MMrJcbkLK2 via @matrixlms

— Erika Rykun (@erika_rykun) August 21, 2019

More information about Irish Tech News and the Business Showcase

FYI the ROI for you is => Irish Tech News now gets over 1.5 million monthly views, and up to 900k monthly unique visitors, from over 160 countries. We have over 860,000 relevant followers on Twitter on our various accounts & were recently described as Ireland’s leading online tech news site and Ireland’s answer to TechCrunch, so we can offer you a good audience!

Since introducing desktop notifications a short time ago, which notify readers directly in their browser of new articles being published, over 16000 people have now signed up to receive them ensuring they are instantly kept up to date on all our latest content. Desktop notifications offer a unique method of serving content directly to verified readers and bypass the issue of content getting lost in people’s crowded news feeds.

Drop us a line if you want to be featured, guest post, suggest a possible interview, or just let us know what you would like to see more of in our future articles. We’re always open to new and interesting suggestions for informative and different articles. Contact us, by email, twitter or whatever social media works for you and hopefully we can share your story too and reach our global audience.

Irish Tech News

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at [email protected] or on Twitter: @SimonCocking