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Don’t Let Internal Software Lag
Customer-facing software gets all the attention. Companies pour seemingly endless time and money into the user experience of their websites and applications. This makes a lot of sense. Companies should be eager to jump on newer trends for consumers. You want to try and stay ahead of the competition and provide customers with the best options possible. Improving customer-facing software can have a huge and immediate impact on income.
However, you can’t rely on customer-facing software alone to power your business. If it’s getting more attention than internal platforms and processes, then you might want to rethink how your company is handling software.
Internal software powers business processes that keep your company running smoothly. From accounts payable, to purchasing, to expense management, internal software streamlines, simplifies and improves essential business processes. Using reliable internal software is just as important as keeping your website updated and it’ll have just as much of a positive impact on company finances.
Keeping Up Appearances
Most major businesses present a solid front. They seem well-contained and highly functional, especially the larger ones. On the inside, though, things can be seriously warped. Often, despite the best intentions, you’ll see similar patterns of bad practices building on each other. And paper-based processes or clunky, outdated software only makes the troubles harder to get rid of.
A lot of companies have the same problems under the hood. There are cumbersome processes. There are procedures from years ago that don’t have a clear purpose anymore. Sometimes flexible approvals and validations vary based on who’s available to ask at that moment—which is not exactly GAAP appropriate. Other times, labor intensive manual processing lurks around for decades before someone stops and examines the reasoning behind them. Comparing audit reports are also highly revealing—there are frequently deficiencies in transparency, efficiency, and overall accountability.
Maintaining customer-facing appearances is important to ongoing success. But it’s also vital to keep your internal processes functioning well. Ideally, you’ll want to keep your business from getting to a point where the solid front is hiding internal mayhem in the first place. You don’t want to find yourself stuck in a holding pattern because expensive processes and ongoing delays keep your business from growing the way it really should. If that sounds like a place your company’s in—or something you’d like to avoid—updating business processing software can be a big help.
Can It Be Automated?
Manual processes are important for businesses, even in the modern digital age. Every business runs into certain needs that just won’t be easily boiled down into something short and simple. However, this doesn’t happen quite as often as you’d think. More often than not, work stays labor intensive because the existing internal technology can’t support the necessary solution. Many times, if the solution exists, higher-ups think that implementing it would be prohibitively expensive or wouldn’t give enough return on investment to justify the time and expense.
Though it’s possible to keep doing tasks like data entry and reconciling invoices and purchase orders manually, these things take up a lot of time. They snowball rapidly and can start to take over your back office. You lose time and money when your employees need to devote too much time and resources to routine tasks. Even if your customer-facing platforms are up to date, it’ll keep you behind the competition if your internal processes are stuck in the past.
If a task can be automated, implementing that automation saves time. This frees up employees to focus on other tasks. In addition to speeding up processing, automation also improves accuracy by virtually eliminating human error. Because the business processing software automatically records information about every process, you’ll also get digital records that are easy to search and take up much less storage space than paper files.
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Software Enhancement Strategy
Continuously favoring customer improvements over internal ones is a typical cause of bad internal processes. While that customer-facing side is vital, only focusing your resources on consumer software is not a long-term, sustainable model. If you’re neglecting internal software, then the platforms you use every day to process invoices, make purchases, or reimburse travel expenses could be holding you back.
The good news is that you may not need to ditch the system entirely to make progress. Outside software providers like NextProcess offer a suite of tools designed to integrate with existing ERP systems. Our software-as-a-service options let you update internal technology quickly and easily.
Updating your internal processes means having a chance to review everything and figure out if you’re doing it the smartest way possible. You can take this opportunity to implement updated approval policies, streamline document management, and create a better workflow for all your financial needs. And since our software is flexible and customizable, you can set it up to automatically enforce your company’s policies and support business goals.
Next Steps with NextProcess
Keeping your customers happy is a number one priority. But keeping them in mind also means making sure your back-office procedures allow for maximum growth. When you add a software partner to help automate procedures and create visibility, you open your business up to a world of new possibilities.
Here at NextProcess, we also make our customers a number one priority. Our goal is to deliver the best possible software solutions to support your business. We support every step of software implementation to ensure it goes smoothly for your company. We also offer flexible pricing systems, so you only pay for what you need. And we keep updating and supporting our software, so you get all the newest advances in security and processing technology without needing to update anything on your end.
Ready to see the difference NextProcess can make for your company? Contact us today and set up a free demo so you can see first-hand how our software can improve your internal business processes.
