There are many tasks that you have to complete to keep the business operating… but there has to be a better way.

Are you spending too much time in excel than necessary? What can you do to improve critical workflows that support your business? In this article, we’ll walk you through steps that have helped many of our clients. Let’s get started

Using Excel for Business Processes? We can help!

Step 1: Say goodbye to those excel spreadsheets.

Are you tracking everything in excel? Is it hard to sort through all the data? Are you not getting intuitive reports that help you make informed business decisions? Can you quickly find what is most important?

Example 1: Let’s say you have a massive excel spreadsheet with data around construction permits. You need to quickly determine when permits will expire. If you had a predefined query tool that allows you to choose “show me everything that will expire in the next 30 days,” you’re able to get the data you need without all the guesswork, errors or confusion. With Excel you need to manipulate and find the data. However, if the data is entered incorrectly to begin with then you’re not seeing what you should anyways. Your data is continuously falling through the cracks.

Example 2: Another example is in the billing and invoicing process. You might be individually opening each invoice, saving each as a PDF, printing or emailing based on known client contact information. Wouldn’t it be nice if it only took you one click or one action to send an invoice, rather than six clicks or taking up minutes instead of seconds?

These are major problems that our clients face, that’s why it’s important to know there is an efficient and simple way to solve this issue — and it’s worth investigating. To solve these issues and help your workday be more efficient, you have options with automation and workflow customization.

First, start with identifying your most tedious, repetitive and time-consuming tasks. These tasks probably take up most of your time. You might be going through multiple steps and/or programs to get all of your information into one report.

Step 2: Streamline, automate, and customize to eliminate duplicate data entry, sort through data, and make your job easier.

It shouldn’t take you an excessive amount of time to do one task, for example, sending an invoice or bill to a customer or vendor.

With every task automated, you can spend more time on the things that matter and get more work done. This keeps your boss happy and therefore, he doesn’t have to hire another person to help you do your job. Rather, your boss can save money and put those resources towards other areas of your business.

1) By setting up a recurring feature in your workflow will save you time.

2) By leveraging software integrations and customization, you eliminate your intense excel spreadsheets and headaches.

Different software programs that you use should all speak together, pushing data back and forth so you can get meaningful data that helps you make decisions. Through integrating different systems or creating new software, you can see and use information from multiple software tools in one dashboard, or master report.

For example, with a software integration a billing and invoice workflow becomes:

1. Select all invoices you want to bill.
2. Click SEND INVOICES.
3. DONE

Simple, right?

An integration consolidates your business processes by allowing two or more different programs talk to each other.

We use integrations to stitch together different, uncommunicative software systems so that the data contained in each becomes part of your personalized, more comprehensive system that quickly and easily shares data when needed.

With an integration or customized software, you can import and export your data between programs create a seamless and simplified workflow. You can send data like employee hours, earnings, job transfers and other critical data without relying on another software system that could discontinue its service. (Learn what integrations are here.)

Contact our team for a personalized analysis of your software systems and workflows. We can create a custom solution that works to improve your existing systems, simplify your data handling, and make your life easier.