Last Updated: December 8th, 2017
Growing your business without adding huge costs can be a challenge. Adding costs may put a strain on your cash flow, which affects your ability to operate your business. Technology now allows a company to grow the business and keep costs under control. In other words, you can take on more business and increase your profits simply by using the right technology.
Think through your process
There are dozens of tech tools that can help you save time and money. To decide which tools will make the biggest impact, think through all of the routine tasks you perform. Once you fully understand what you do, you can decide which tech tools are the most important.
Say, for example, that you manufacture clothing for the outdoor sports market (hikers and bikers). You order raw materials and pay a staff to run production equipment. Once your product is produced, you box up the purchase and send it to the customer. You sell primarily through your website and through ads placed on social media.
Ideally, every business should document all of their routine tasks in a procedures manual. The manual can be a great training tool for new staff members. Go through your manual and identify the largest areas of spending in your outdoor sports market business. See if you can find a tech tool that will help you cut your largest costs.
Tools for communication
There are many tech applications that allow you to improve communications and cut expenses. Use cloud computing for as many business tasks as possible. Using the cloud has several benefits:
• The cloud eliminates the need to back up data at your office. Cloud computing can be done on servers located off-site.
• Doing business in the cloud reduces the amount of paper you must process and file.
• Sharing documents is much easier using cloud computing. You can set up files that can be shared, updated and saved by a group of people- regardless of where they are located.
• You can also use the cloud to get documents signed using an electronic signature. If a customer needs to sign a contract, they can sign the document and sent it back using the cloud. Everyone who needs the document can receive a copy by email.
SIP trunking can dramatically reduce the cost and improve the efficiency of your phone system. Rather than operate through traditional phone lines, a SIP system uses an IP address. SIP allows you to scale up and add far greater phone capacity without a big increase in costs. If you need to scale down, SIP also makes that task easier.
Accounting and payroll
As you sell to more customers, you need to process more accounting transactions. Quickbooks provides a cloud-based accounting system that’s easy to use. You can quickly learn how to post accounting transactions. Quickbooks also provides dozens of accounting reports you can use to run your business.
Increasing your staff may be the biggest challenge to a business owner. One reason why is the complexity of payroll. You have to deal with the wages, tax withholding and benefit payments for dozens (or even hundreds) of different people. In addition, the tax laws related to payroll change constantly.
You can outsource your payroll function to a payroll firm, such as ADP. You provide the wage and withholding information to the payroll company. The payroll firm calculates all of the proper withholdings and computes the worker’s net pay.
Some firms provide access to a business bank account. The payroll company can use the account to transmit payments to employees. You may find that using an outside company can save you hours of time processing payroll.
Analyze your business needs and start using more technology. You may be able to increase your sales without substantially increasing your costs.