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4 Signs It’s Time To Automate Your Business Processes
You’ve probably heard quite a bit about business process automation (BPA) recently. It’s a trending topic in the business world and a highly recommended step for forward-thinking businesses. But is BPA right for you?
Perhaps you’re running a small business and don’t think there’s a reason to automate until it starts growing. Or perhaps you’re happy with the way your process currently works. It might be time to give automation a second look, though, especially if you’re seeing signs that your current process isn’t working as well as it used to.
You’re Losing Money
If you’re losing money or aren’t sure how much you’re spending on business processes, automation provides oversight and control. AP departments run on paper may be hemorrhaging money in late fees, duplicate payments, and costly errors. We can’t tell you how much you’re currently spending, but we can tell you other businesses who’ve switched from paper to automation have cut costs by up to 250% per invoice.
It’s much the same in other departments. Human error when making CapEx budgets, generating purchase orders, or handling travel expense reports costs money. Automating will take care of most, or even all, these problems.
You’re Wasting Time
While there are business processing tasks that require a human touch, much of it’s time-consuming and routine. When you feel like you or your employees are spending too much time with manual data entry, filing expense paperwork, or other tasks, it’s time to consider automation.
BPA provides a means of capturing data electronically. For AP, most of the processing is automatic and the software will match invoices with purchase orders in the system. For expense reporting, an automated system lets employees enter their reports remotely and then processes the request automatically. Every record is stored digitally, which saves time when searching for information.
You’re Overwhelmed
No matter how hard you work you can’t seem to catch up with the paperwork. Sound familiar? BPA can help you take control of your processing and move things through more efficiently.
Instead of entering AP data manually, you let electronic data capture technology handle it. Rather than hounding employees to turn in expense reports, you let them do it online via a secure submission portal. Instead of trying to keep everyone in the loop about procurement, you route everything through a shared purchase order module.
You Can’t Track Data
As your business grows, it becomes harder and harder to keep track of all your information. Trouble finding data on past financial trends makes it difficult to budget, and having to sort through paper files with transaction information makes audits a nightmare.
When your data starts getting out of hand, automation can help. NextProcess software solutions store all the information on past transactions in a format you can easily search and use. All your data is right there at your fingertips and you can securely access it from any device with internet access.
Is business process automation starting to sound good? Get in touch with us and we’ll schedule a demonstration so you can see just how much BPA can help your business.
