Features from Meantime IT

Grow your business with good systems, and liberate your staff

As businesses grow, so the processes develop. Order forms are filled in triplicate and filed; spreadsheets keep track of customer details; bits of paper are moved from one tray to another in order to ensure that the customer’s order is taken, despatched and replacement stock ordered.

But the more the business grows, the more the systems start to creak. Bits of paper go missing, the person who understands how the formula in the spreadsheet works is off sick, and an order gets lost. The people who have made the business the success it is through their fantastic sales acumen, or their vigour in chasing up overdue invoices, are sidelined into spending hours each day just making sure the systems are ticking over in order for the business to keep running.

Automate the admin…

So at this stage, a small business owner might start thinking about spending £15,000 a year on a dedicated admin staffer to keep up with the paperwork. That’s £15,000 every year just to make sure that paper gets filed and orders don’t get lost. Then, the company grows more, so another new member of admin staff is needed and the one who’s been there two years wants a pay rise. And before you know it, five years have passed and you’ve spent £150,000 in salaries just to keep the office in shape.

But invest a fraction of that salary budget into a bespoke business processing system that’s been designed to do exactly what all the paper shuffling does but without the labour intensive man hours, and you’ve made a one-off investment that will automate your business processes for as long as you have a business. And, not only will you have a unique business system that will set you apart from your competitors in terms of efficiency and expertise, you’ve freed up your capital to invest in staff that will actually bring in business, not just keep track of the business you have.

…and watch your staff thrive

Bespoke business systems - those which have been designed specifically for your business by software experts who have studied the way you work from the bottom up and know exactly what you want it to do – liberate your staff from mundane, labour intensive tasks. Those people who were beginning to flag, who were complaining that they didn't have time to do their job properly, who had stopped thriving in the workplace, suddenly find that those dull aspects of their job - tasks that, in fact, weren’t really part of their job - have gone. They have hours in the day to do the role they were hired to do.

And, with the right system, as your business grows your systems grow with it, enabling you to add or amend functionality according to your business needs.

Let the savings speak for themselves

Whether it’s product control (for example, a system which, following the input of an order, orders the stock, dispatches the stock and triggers a new stock delivery from the supplier, sends out an invoice and reminds you when it’s due, while also automatically storing your customers details and preferences and using them to create a targeted message for your next email marketing campaign, and then gives you daily, weekly or monthly sales reports at the touch of a button) or a complicated staff time-sheet system (which automatically works out pay rates, expenses, overtime, tax and national insurance), clever systems will incorporate room for growth. So when customers grow from 200 to 2000, the processes are exactly the same.

The savings in bespoke business systems are huge - sometimes immeasurable. But they won’t replace your staff, they’ll just help you to get the best from them.

Download this guide as a pdf