The major issue in 2020 was obviously COVID-19. The novel coronavirus or SASRS-CoV-2, as it is technically called, has affected 217 countries around the globe with 53.3 million cases and 1.3 deaths and counting.
This figure is as of November 14, 2019 and published by worldmeters.info. The first case of Coronavirus was reported in Wuhan province of China in December 2019, soon it reached Europe and elsewhere. Currently, 90 percent of coronavirus cases are outside China.
From the US, a developed nation, to India, a developing nation Corona Virus has hit everything from education, industry, hospitality, and businesses. A lot of businesses have either shut down or have gone into hibernation.
If you are an entrepreneur and if your business is shaky due to Covid-19, you will have to cut your running cost until this passes away. You will have to take measures to minimize your operational cost until vaccines and drugs are invented and available widely.
If your business is reeling due to the Covid-19 pandemic, you might want to cut staff, however, cutting staff is not the only solution, there are other areas as well that will help you minimize your business expenses. If you looking forward to minimizing your operational cost, here are some of the things you can do.
1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
CRM software allows you to manage and track your sales leads, appointments, contacts, and conversations without having to manually input everything in a spreadsheet. You can let your sales manager use a CRM to control marketing campaigns, data analysis, and customer care.
You can use Zoho CRM (minimum of $30 per month) to create email marketing campaigns and manage your social media in one platform. SugarCRM (minimum of $480 per year) lets you do sales forecasting and manage incoming customer requests.
2. Payroll
Most small business owners dread paydays. Not only because you have to shed cash on your staff’s salary, but you also need to spend some time to do various computations for taxes and benefits. Needless to say, you have to make sure that every deductions, claims, bonuses and overtime pay has to be accurate. Fortunately, you can automate payroll and accounting.
The eVantage HR (minimum of $22) provides payroll-related services including calculation of monthly payroll, monitoring and tracking employee and statutory deductions. On the other hand, INFO-PAY (minimum of $420+) has a developed integrated HR system that includes Time Attendance System, E-mail Payslip, Employee’s Web portal, online payments and tracks salary increment.
3. Invoicing
As a business owner, you need to keep track of your accounts receivable though it means filling out and sending an invoice every time a client makes a transaction. Imagine multiple transactions in a day with only one staff to do the invoicing. This usually takes too much time and effort unless you automate your invoicing.
QuickBooks (starts at $15 per month) allows you to set up a custom invoice template and keep track which accounts are paid or overdue.
4. Inventory Management
Automating your inventory management can increase efficiency and improve accuracy. While it is vital to have these benefits for your businesses, many entrepreneurs hesitate to adopt inventory management automation.
They think it will cost too much and it will take a long time to get used to. While it is true that you have to initially spend on it, it is assuring to know that some money lenders or crowdfunding sites lend you instant cash for your small business.
When you use an inventory management system, you can easily keep track of your products’ location and availability, retrieve information about a specific lot number, plan out reservations, and calculate how much product to reorder. EZ Office Inventory will let you do these and more at $95.00 per month.
5. Content Marketing
Automating your content marketing will save you more time and money. Now, these are the advantages all business owners want. Yet, to set your expectations straight, you will need various tools and software to improve your overall content marketing strategy.
There are three things that you can automate when it comes to content marketing: creation, curation, and distribution.
With content creation, no Artificial Intelligence (AI) can come up with truly creative ideas but you can use tools to help you make better content such as the headline analyzer CoSchedule (free of charge).
You can use DrumUp (starts at $15 per months) to sort through billions of pieces of content and recommend the most relevant to your target audience. You can also link your blog updates to post on your social media accounts.
Tips to Introduce Automation to Your Business
Once you have chosen which software or app you want to use in your business process, you need to introduce it to your staff. It’s one thing to reduce the workload of your staff but making them adjust to the automation is another story. Here are some tips to help you implement your business automation smoothly.
Let Your Staff Fully Understand the Process
You need to take some time and take a look at the process itself. At the same time, you and the staff who will get to use the software must evaluate the process and look for changes you can still make to maximize the benefits of automation.
Help the Team Adopt
Your automation can only work if the people using it can properly adapt to it. Naturally, change is hard. Allow a training and adjustment period to any automation you introduce to your business.
Calculate the ROI
At the end of the day, the Return on Investment will tell you if you are on the right track. Compare the time, efficiency, and costs it will take to do a certain process manually and with automation. Take advantage of the free trials to get the feet of the automation first before subscribing.
Consider the Security Risks
Automation makes things easier and faster, but it can also do the same for a malicious attacker looking for a backdoor to extract information. Be mindful of your data security and plan ahead.
Consider Long Term Solutions
Make sure that you are using scalable cloud-based systems and third-party apps. When your company grows, your process has to grow flexibly with the tools you are using. Your solution must adapt to future changes.
