Don’t Settle For Mediocrity: Drive Efficiency In Your Business With Tech

Right now we’re living in a Golden Age for business efficiency. Never before have there been so many new apps and technologies to help us be more productive. At the same time, costs as falling and each person can get a lot more done.

We’ve come a long way from just 15 years ago. Back then, startups were very different animals. Most people set up their businesses with just a computer, telephone and fax machine. Social media had yet to be invented, let alone social media management apps and personalized news feeds. And only a few businesses were even online. The web wasn’t seen as the business platform it is today. It was more of a sideshow. It’s hard to believe, but radio and TV were once the main events.

Since that “ancient” time, we’ve gotten a whole host of new tools. And these have enabled businesses to become far more efficient. Just look at what companies like Twitter and Apple have managed to achieve with such small workforces. Twitter, for instance, famously employs only fifty people. Apple employs around 66,000. But again, this is tiny given the company’s enormous market cap.

It’s clear, therefore, that digital technology allows a few people to generate tremendous value. But this isn’t something that is necessarily confined to the elite of Silicon Valley. As technology advances, it is becoming more democratized. More and more businesses are getting access to software that once cost thousands of dollars, often for free. And the tools themselves are becoming increasingly capable.

So where do the limits lie? It’s not the technology itself that is holding back business. It’s our ability, as businesspeople, to keep up with what’s out there. Implementing new systems can be a significant challenge for companies. And often, by the time a system has been put in place, there’s a better one ready and waiting to go.

The fact that we see rapid obsolescence, however, shouldn’t put businesses off. It’s better to use systems that are a single generation out of date, than systems that are much older. Here are some of the best, latest technologies out there that can drive up your business’s efficiency and make you more like Apple.

Finances
Accounting Today recently reported on the efficiency burden on small businesses of filing taxes. According to the study, more than half of business owners said they spent more than 41 hours a year on taxes. The situation for small business owners is worse. They reported spending more than 80 hours on their tax returns each year. That’s two entire working weeks up in smoke on a single task. The costs of filing a tax return were in themselves taxing. 46 per cent of businesses in the US spend more than $5,000 for the privilege of paying their taxes. And only a quarter spend less than $1000.

So with all these grim statistics, can technology help? Fortunately, it can. The major cost of filing company returns right now is the labor cost for the accountant. Accountants don’t come cheap and the tax code is hugely complex. But software is able to perform a lot of the cognitive tasks that used to be the preserve of people. For instance, apps like Wave link to your business bank account. This allows you to update your ledger automatically whenever you enter into a transaction. These transactions can then be classified with a single click, saving work for your accountant. Businesses can also upload receipts, and the program will automatically figure out what the receipt is saying. These machine learning systems still require human input to confirm details. But they dramatically reduce the amount of time spent filing.

Businesses have an assortment of applications from which to choose, including FreshBooks and Square.

Organization
As business become more knowledge-based, their requirements are changing. They need systems that can reliably process vast streams of data and documents. Have you ever noticed that you to-do list seems to be getting totally out of control? Have you noticed how your documents folder is always expanding and always disorganized?

It would be nice if somebody could ride to the rescue with a system that organized all of this for you. Fortunately, the prayers of many businesses have been answered by the booming app market. Now there are a myriad of generic products, like Dropbox and Apple’s iCloud for general storage. And there are also more targeted products for specific industries. Contract lifecycle management software, for instance, is used in the legal and logistics sectors. These platforms enable entrepreneurs to connect with their work and employees no matter where they are. And it allows them to avoid data crashes and missed deadlines.

Marketing
In the introduction to this piece, we briefly touched on social media management tools. Back when social media was new, businesses pretty much ignored it. It was seen as something for students, by students, with little marketing potential. By 2010, it was becoming apparent that social media was more than just a place to spam what you had for breakfast. It was a whole new tool that could be used to market products. The problem was that many companies had to invest a lot of time in managing their social media platforms. In other words, it was still quite expensive, like regular, old-fashioned marketing. Then we got social media marketing apps, and the world changed for small businesses. Now they could organize a convincing social media presence with perhaps just a couple of hours work per week.

Today’s businesses shouldn’t forget that online marketing is about creating lots of funnels. You want to be pulling in people through multiple channels to your site from all over the internet. However, a lot of small businesses have been so dazzled by social media they’ve forgotten email. Email marketing is still important. And it can be made easier by apps like MailChimp and Constant Contact. Custom emails can be thrown together in minutes, using the custom templates, and then sent out to subscribers or clients in an instant.

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