Every startup owner wants to grow the business and get to a much higher level of sales. As you increase sales, you’ll have to perform more tasks. Higher revenue means you’ll post more accounting transactions and manage more people. If you don’t take steps to streamline your business, you may operate at a loss.
Use these steps to stay organized and streamline your business.
One unifying system
Technology can be a huge part of your solution. You can find software to help you perform a variety of tasks quickly and efficiently. To get the most out of your technology investment, consider enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.
Why ERP? This concept means that you invest in one unified computer system to handle all of your tasks. With ERP, your operations, human resources, marketing and accounting tasks are all preformed on the same integrated system.
Here are some benefits of using one system:
- Training: Your entire staff can be trained on one system. While your marketing department may use a different set of programs than the accounting staff, everyone can navigate and share documents on the same system.
- Analytics: Because data for each department is produced using the same system, your team can generate reports faster. Accessing information quickly helps your managers make faster decisions.
- Shorter operating cycle: Your operating cycle is the time it takes to receive a customer order, produce your product or service and receive payment from the client. An integrated approach can help you shorten this cycle. If you can collect customer payments in less time, you don’t need as much cash to operate.
All of these benefits justify the expense of implementing an ERP system.
Specific areas to automate
Every business has specific areas that are most time-consuming. These are the areas that can benefit from automation. While every company is different, here are two areas that may require a big time investment.
Operations
Operations represents that tasks you perform to fulfill a customer’s order, bill the client and collect payment. If you manufacture a product, for example, you have to order materials and plan your labor costs. Once the product is completed, you need to package the item and store the goods in inventory.
Automation can streamline your operations in several ways. You can track customer orders and the materials you have on hand. Your system can estimate how much inventory you’ll need to fill customer orders. The software can also track the time it takes to ship goods from your warehouse to the client.
All of this information can help you make better decisions about ordering materials and planning your production. As you make better decisions, you can cut costs.
Marketing
Technology can make a huge impact on your marketing process. You can integrate many of your tasks and save time.
Online publishing tools allow you to select a template for your website. You can build an attractive website and sharply reduce the cost of programming. Your website tool should be linked to your analytics and social media outlets. With this system, you can post updates to social media and track all of your web activity through a single system.
Conclusion
Managing growth can be challenging. If you don’t plan carefully, your expenses can quickly add up. Use technology to keep your costs down as you grow your business.
