Features from Meantime IT

Introduce efficiencies now to avoid cuts later

Whether you’re a start-up or established business, experiencing growth or in the unfortunate position of having to cut back, paying for staff to carry out boring, repetitive administrative functions that can be done more quickly and accurately by simple software is a huge waste.

But rather than replacing staff, investing in software that’s designed specifically for your business can enable you to hire people that will contribute to growth. Developing a bespoke software system that will automate routine administrative processes can cost as little as the equivalent of a year’s salary for a member of junior staff. And, after you’ve made that one-off investment, you can invest money into taking on staff that will help your business to grow, not just keep the admin ticking over.

Every business has routine procedures that need to be carried out in order to operate, and almost without exception, they can be done more efficiently by introducing custom-designed software.

Streamline sales processes

If you sell a product, there are several stages to be observed before the customer receives his or her goods. Three or four people can be involved in the simple act of ‘customer buys product’. Customer service operators take orders, warehouse staff pick, pack and ensure stock levels are kept consistent, accounts staff send invoices and follow up payment. And if this is all done using a paper-based system, with various chitties and order forms flying around, you’ll need someone to keep track and file this paper trail. And if an order’s not received, then someone’s got to go back through that paper trail and find out where the fault lies.

Investing a relatively small sum into creating a software package to automate the sales process brings about a dramatic reduction in the number of actions needed to carry out the simple action of ‘customer buys product’. Customer places order. The act of inputting the order onto the software system triggers a chain of events which are deployed in seconds: order is placed, order triggers automatic command to warehouse to despatch order AND re-order stock, despatching of order triggers automatic action to create and issue invoice, and in the event of non-payment, reminders are automatically sent.

And with this simple process automated, your salary budget is free to be invested into staff who can make the sales you need to keep your business healthy. Nicholas Homes Group did just that, and buisness manager Janet Schofield says the Turkish property developer and holiday let company would need ‘an army of call centre staff’ to carry out the functions their automated system does, meaning they can invest their capital into building more properties. MD of workwear embroidery specialists Coniston Corporate agrees – he says his company has ‘grown beyond all expectations’ since their bespoke software was implemented.

Make your clients sell for you

Once you’ve invested into an automated ordering system, you have the tools in place to provide you with a third-party revenue stream that will actually make your clients sell for you.

If your clients are buying in bulk and selling onto the public, installing your own software onto their website will enable them to offer your goods to their customers with the appearance they’re selling direct to them. Using a simple e-commerce platform, the automated system described above can be branded up for any of your clients, enabling their customers to place their orders with your client – but the orders come directly to you.

Coniston Corporate did just that with their branded workwear, allowing customers such as sports teams to sell branded kit direct to their customers from their own websites. And Nicholas Homes Group’s on e-commerce platform allows travel agents to book their rental properties directly from its own booking system.

Automate payment systems

If you employ people, then you have a responsibility to pay them what you owe them on time. When you’re starting out and have a couple of part-time employees, this can be a relatively simple task that can be done with basic accounting software. But as your business expands things can start to get very complicated. You may have part-time staff on a fixed rate, a sales team on a basic rate plus commission plus expenses, or you may staff your business with locums and temps to cope with busy periods.

When the variables are so wide, keeping track of who’s done what hours, what tax rate is applicable and when expenses are due can become a full-time job in itself, and sometimes whole departments are created simply to pay the people who keep your business afloat. But for an SME, hiring whole departments is simply not an option, but neither is spending days on end inputting hours, tax rates and mileage claims into spreadsheets.

Installing a simple software system which will automate the whole payment process can completely eliminate the need to hire staff simply to pay other staff. Creating a system which takes into account differing terms and conditions, pay rates, tax rates and expenses claims means that instead of spending hours working out salaries manually, staff can simply enter their own hours and the system will automate the rest – tax, national insurance, over-time due – and even make the payment into their account.

Ian Brindley, managing director of social care agency Entrust, was spending two days a week processing payments for his locum care workers. That’s been cut to just two hours since he deployed a bespoke software system, saving, he says, “a significant amount of operational overheads and at least one member of administration staff, to the tune of at least £20,000 each year.” Ian’s invested the saving into hiring more care staff and expanding his business. “Without the software, we simply wouldn’t have been able to expand the way we have,” he says.

Keep systems consistent

If you have several branches of your business each with its own manager, or perhaps run a franchised operation, it can be difficult to keep track of the different systems each manager has in place. When your operation relies on banking being done on time, or commission payments being made promptly, ploughing through the individual paper-based systems of your employees or franchisees can be a full-time job in itself.

Investing as little as £12,000 – a one-off fee that’s less than the annual salary of a member of admin staff - into a bespoke software system that automates every area of your business will not only give managers or franchisees a safety net and structure to their business, it was also allow the business owner to spot any potential problems early, offer help where needed, keep tight control of finances and use the software as a selling point to help the business grow. And, because it’s bespoke, it will do everything you want it to do, exactly how you want it.
Whether your business is a drama academy or a book shop, developing your own web-based business software system to automate everything from sales figures to VAT returns to marketing campaigns will provide managers with much-needed support and remove a whole admin layer to free up time to concentrate on increasing sales.

Margaret Darley is the administration manager at international franchise Helen O’Grady Drama Academies. “Having a standardised internet management system has helped us to sell the business as a business – it’s a much more professional, computerised set-up than we had before, and in terms of time, it’s saved us hours and hours of chasing every month” she says.

Conversion not duplication

For some more estblished organisations, there are systems in place that simply must be adhered to. It may be that a large organisation has such a huge amount of information stored it simply would not be cost-effective to introduce a new system and transfer information to it. But as businesses grow and change, new practices are introduced so data becomes duplicated. Details are entered onto one system, then printed out and entered into another to be dealt with.

In case such as this, it may not be cost-effective to implement a whole new system, but neither is it cost effective to pay people simply to input one set of information into two or more systems. Creating a piece of ‘middleware’ – software that sits between the systems and automatically takes information from one and uploads it to another – completley eliminates the need to duplicate data entry. And the people that previously spent hours typing in data can now spend their time processing the information – whether it’s payments coming in or money owed out - considerably speeding up the business processes and keeping that all-important cash flowing.


Whatever your business, its size or sector, identifying repetitive tasks and introducing systems to implement them now can avoid you making cuts later – and a little clever investment goes a long way.

Download this guide as a pdf