Four ways to automate your business and avoid lockdown frustration with Cloud

The problem

Even though the playing field has changed, business must still go on. This means that your business admin and normal day-to-day tasks cannot fall behind. But working remotely can be hard when most of the files, documents and equipment in the office – and your team –  are all scattered all across the country. 

It takes time and resources to do the normal tasks. Having gone through all of your “extra” or “unnecessary” expenses, you also realised that there is a gap in the operational flow of the company. A growing company also needs to expand or scale in order to rise above this “minor” set back.

The solution

Let’s streamline with Cloud Accounting!  Automation is one of those areas that could easily help scale your business and increase efficiency and productivity – thereby making use of the time and human capital that you have available in order to get that effective value to pull through. 

It’s super easy and frees up a lot of your time which will enable you to rather channel your focus on building out the next steps and incorporate new opportunities instead of admin. Here are five ways in which automation can help you get better results in your business:

1. Make Xero the backbone of your financial infrastructure – Cloud accounting tools like Xero can easily be considered as the backbone in our team’s cloud infrastructure as part of our business resilience strategy. What’s nice about Xero is that it has a few automatic automations just baked into the system and makes a huge difference in the way we do things. It implements rules and reminders when it comes to banking fees, insurance, salaries etc. It all depends on how you set it up. Financial admin – sorted!
2. Payment process to run smooth – When someone needs to pay an invoice they have the option to pay now (stated on the invoice). This cool feature allows the person receiving the invoice to pay immediately with an automatic reconciliation that happens in the background against the fees and money that goes directly to your bank account. This is far better than the old school manual process where the invoice receiver needs to log into their banking app, make the payment and wait for a few hours to show (if it’s a different bank), and finally sends you the proof of payment. Magical! It makes the bank recon a breeze! 
3. Connect accounting with documents – Zapier is the king in this space. Think of it as a glue that connects your apps so they can work together and at the end of the day, create a better workflow. For example, when someone completes a form, it should automatically be added to your newsletter group or to your contact list which then enables you to send an invoice with the correct information. 
4. Automate your billing process – Bill-and-receive automation can be done without you spending any time on it. You can automate the billing process while all invoices have different designs, the system will be able to extract all of the relevant information, and present an accurate reflection of your accounts payable to whom, with how much, by when and where the payment must go. You get all of that information without even doing anything or avoiding human error. At the same time the system also digitally filles the invoice for when it’s needed for tax or VAT audit, which you can just pull from the system at any time.

Automation fits into our business resilience and intelligence strategy as it makes sure that you get the right information, which is consistently correct and can decrease your operating expenses and manage it better. If you are interested in automating your business, perhaps adopt some of these apps into your business strategy, get in touch with us today.

This article has been put together by Johan Potgieter CA(SA), Cloud Accounting Manager; Certified Xero Advisor

Johan heads-up our cloud accounting department. With his extensive knowledge of internal structures and corresponding business models, optimising internal business processes through cloud automation, systems and integrations, he adds immense value to our OCFO clients. Johan has leadership skills like few other, and takes pride in finding solutions that adds value to SME’s.