Category: Operations

The world of business has changed dramatically over the last decade. No longer is the 9-to-5 routine the norm and more and more people provide services in freelance positions or run small businesses on their own or with just a few employees. These changes have made a big difference in how people run their businesses and the tools they use to get the job done.

These days there’s an app, an online tool, or another small business waiting in the wings to help you make your business a success. Whether it’s a communication channel geared toward remote work staff or simple ways to accept credit cards for payment via a smartphone, the people on the other side of the digital world are continuously creating ingenious ways to help businesses run better, faster, and smarter.

If you’re a business owner and want to break away from some of the traditional models we’re all used to then consider some of these tools that might take your business to a new level.

Managing Expense Reports and Travel

If you or any of your employees incur a number of travel-related expense reports during the course of the quarter or fiscal year then you know how frustrating it can be to keep track of receipts, mileage, and other travel-related expenses.

Enter Expensify. This app allows users to keep track of expenses by integrating with other apps, such as Uber, and allows users to scan receipts and send them to the appropriate person in an instant. It also integrates with airlines, rental car companies, and hotel chains to automatically integrate expenses in real time. This is probably the best app available for expense tracking and, again, it’s perfect if your business requires frequent travel.

Mobile Payment Systems

Small businesses and businesses that conduct most of their work outside the office have previously struggled to accept credit cards for payment while on the go. Without a standard POS system and credit card reader it used to be almost impossible to accept payment in any form other than cash or check, both of which are inconvenient, especially for accounting purposes.

Today companies like Square and many others offer credit card readers that attach to your smartphone or tablet so you can accept credit cards no matter where you are. Some of these apps can also integrate with your inventory system and other accounting tools you use to make the payment process of your business much easier to manage. Square might be the most well-known tool, but other mobile payment processors include PayPal Here, LevelUp, and Spark Pay.

Invoicing Tools

One of the main tasks of a freelancer or small-business owner is invoicing. This can become very cumbersome if you have a large number of clients and even worse when clients don’t pay within the contracted time. Taking the time to chase down payments takes time away from work that does pay and leaves many freelancers in a bind. Hiring legal services is often too cost prohibitive, yet losing the money owed can be devastating.

Many companies are turning toward invoice factoring to handle this very issue. An invoice factoring company essentially buys your outstanding invoices freeing up revenue instead of having to wait until outstanding clients paid up. These companies do charge a percentage of the amount owed for their services but if you have a stack of overdue invoices it can be a small price to pay to collect what you’re owed.

If you find you spend too much time creating invoices, free yourself up with an invoice creation tool. Some of the top ones to consider are FreshBooks, Invoiced, and InvoicedTo.

Managing Communication

More and more companies operate on a completely remote system and employees could be located in any part of the world. This is a rapidly increasing trend and team communication is critical in this very different type of business environment. Email isn’t always the best route when you have several members of team that need to communicate in real time.

Tools like Slack have become the top choice of remote businesses to ensure their communication needs are met. Within Slack it’s easy to create channels for certain employees who are working on a project so they can chat, files of all kinds are easily shared, and private messaging is also one of its features. According to Slack, the use of their service cuts internal emails in half and increases productivity by up to 30 percent.

Running and managing a business has never been an easy task but today we have thousands of tools at our disposal to make it just a bit easier. If you’re looking for simple ways to make your business grow consider some of these ways to make that happen.

Article Contributed by Sujain Thomas

Business analytics, also called business intelligence or BI, involves gathering and interpreting data for businesses. Business intelligence has many players, the titansbeing Oracle, SAP, and IBM, the established specialists being SAS, MicroStrategy, and Information Builders, and notable emerging players are Tableau, TIBCO, QlikTech, Birst, andLogi Analytics. There has been an increase in the uptake of business analytics over the past few years among start-ups because of the many benefits these tools give. These include:

• Smart Decision-Making

Business analytics gives you important data that will help you in decision making. You will also be able to make decisions faster. Sales and marketing departments, particularly, stand to benefit from business analytics. You will be able to spot trends, see rise and fall in demand for products/services, note changes by comparing past and current records, return on investment reports for product lines and individual products, quantify customer buying patterns, and use metrics to measure loss and growth.

• Data Visualization

Data visualization, which is at the core of business analytics, will give you clear insight. You can use comprehensive graphs and chart to make the decision making process more interesting. Virtual representation of the data extracted allows you to extract relevant and useful insight in a much clearer way.

• Keeping up to date

Fads come and go and the modern customer changes his mind too easily since he is easily swayed by the “latest” or “better” offer. Business analytics gives you insight on how your target market acts and thinks. Your business will only survive with today’s ever-changing consumer if you are dynamic. It is not uncommon to see a start-up devouring a larger competitor by simply being sensitive to customer needs and you should, therefore, take advantage of this.

• Efficiency

Business analytics greatly improve business efficiency. The quick gathering and analysis of huge amounts of data and its presentation in an appealing way encourages a culture of teamwork and efficiency since employees are able to express their insights and participate in decision making. You also get efficiency since the analysis will guide you on what you need to do to achieve your goals.

• Self-service business analysis

Business analytics allows you to do ad hoc data analysis. This could be recurring analysis or on a one-time-only basis. The data gathered will then be shared with others. On Oracle, this is done through the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition.

• Proactive intelligence delivery

Business analytics can be very proactive. It can provide you with alerts whenever there is a change that matches your filter. This allows you to make decisions in good time.

• Online business analysis

Good BI tools such as Oracle allow for online business analysis and presentation. This is called OLAP on Oracle (online analytical processing analysis and presentation). It allows an Oracle DBA consulting company to connect, which gives you professionalism (if you do not have the necessary knowhow), it saves you money since you do not need to hire a full-time in-house team, and it allows you to concentrate on running your business.

• Anticipative intelligence

Good business analytics tools have anticipative intelligence functionality. Actual and real-time anticipation is important for future planning purposes.

• Improved usability

The relevant insights can be produced for all the different users (such as management, technical staff, and even partners) and not just the analyst. It is possible to optimize information on each step, meaning all levels are able to identify their own roles.

• Analysis of big data

If you have an online presence, your website is search-engine optimized, and you have a good product or service, it is only a matter of time before you start getting high traffic on your site and through doors. Handling all this data can be time-consuming and costly, even for a start-up. Failure to have accurate data is not an option because you not only risk being out of touch with your customers, but you may jeopardize regulatory compliance and corporate security.

• Score-carding capabilities

Although most start-ups do not use BI for score-carding, this is still an important functionality. In contrast to dashboards and reports, which usually display analytics results, scorecards are used to compare results to metrics.

• Improved operations management

BI give operation managers information that will help them make smart operation decisions. Operation managers, HR, and management will understand group and individual worker productivity better. This will lead to better headcount management and effective budget allocation.

• Improved negotiations

The data you get from business intelligence will help you when negotiating with suppliers and other vendors, investors, and other business partners. As an example, if you want to delay paying your supplier because of cash flow problems, the supplier is more likely to accept the delay if you have facts proving that you will be in a better cash position shortly.

• Eliminating waste

A good business analytics system will point out waste or loss that you may not have noticed before. This is particularly important for larger organizations thathave more leaks. The business analytics system will be deployed company-wide and it will work as a single, unified entity, meaning it will analyze transactions between departments and subsidiaries to identify areas of inefficiency and overlap. According to CIO website, thanks to BI tools, Toyota was able to realize it was double paying shippers in the tune of $812,000 in 2000.

All your data will be in a database. Even as you do business analytics, ensure that all the data is protected by deploying proven DB security techniques. You can hire a remote DBA to handle your data. A good DBA will also help you in business analytics and even in search engine optimization.

Avoid the common temptation of using spreadsheets to keep track of your data. This not only wastes your time and energy, but you will also miss such things as trends in the data. You should hire a professional for business analytics because a pro will have the experience necessary. Buy your business analytics tools from renowned vendors such as Oracle because you will get the most functionalities and the best support.

Author Bio:

Sujain Thomas helps businesses do analytics. She also helps businesses develop analytics strategy. She has years of experience in analytics, DB management, and big data. For more information about Oracle DBA consulting, visit this website.

Article Contributed by Robin Singh

Implementing a knowledge base in your business is a perfect way of improving the service that your company offers. Establishing FAQs, employee tutorials and conducting surveys are only some of the things with which a knowledge base can help greatly. This software solution offers benefits for both the customers and business owners. One of the areas in which they can also be particularly helpful is the ecommerce business.

Implementing a knowledge base to an online shopping website is a perfect move that ensures better user experience, customer satisfaction, product or service details, better decision making and a faster buying process. From a business perspective, a higher number of customers and better profit margins with higher conversion rates are guaranteed with a knowledge base standing behind an online store.

 

• Customer satisfaction and user experience

 

Providing good customer satisfaction is a key factor that is going to help your business grow faster. Utilizing the knowledge base is going to help your online store by helping your customers understand every important detail about the product that you are offering. Additionally, the knowledge base can also include FAQ pages that are going to answer all the questions that you customers might have for your company.

Enabling people to easily acquire important information about the product is going to make the whole user experience much better, which will improve word of mouth marketing, which is an essential part of every business strategy.

 

• Product or service details

 

There are literally millions of online shopping websites, however, the majority of them only give a basic summary of a product or service that they are offering. A knowledge base is an important part of the whole shopping experience because it allows for the addition of all the important details that the customer might be interested in.

This includes all the specific product details and any additional information regarding the shipping costs and services. Every good store is equipped with a lot of information about the product or service that they offer, so make sure that you are relying on knowledge base when you are building an online store.

 

• Decision making

 

Offering a lot of important details available to customers is very important, because it turns the whole decision making process into a task that is easy to cover. Customer behavior has significantly changed over the past decade. All of the information that they had at their disposal could only be found in stores, but nowadays, people perform a lot of research before they make a purchase. However, not everyone has the time to spend  on detailed online product research.

This makes it crucial to include as many details about the product being offered as possible. It simply allows a customer to find everything that they need in one place. The decision making process is much easier, which only adds up to the overall user experience.

 

• Faster purchasing speed

 

As all of the important information is already included in the knowledge base, the customer needs much less time to make the satisfying decision. You are there to guide your customer through all the steps that he or she would like to take and by providing this service, people complete the whole process in a much faster manner, as they do not have to roam to other websites looking for answers. All of this contributes to the customer making a faster decision without worrying about making a mistake.

 

• Increasing user base

 

Providing all of these services and information for your customers will positively affect customer satisfaction. Over time, every new customer that you make is certainly going to come back to make a purchase from you once again. Your customers are going to feel a certain level of trust with your business, which is going to make them come back to you in their time of need. Retaining customers is a challenge, but it is also the perfect way of achieving steady business growth.

 

• Higher profits

 

The fact that you are increasing customer numbers also means that you are going to have higher profits. Additionally, you are going to save a lot of money on your customer support service, which is an immediate profit as well. Since there is an abundance of information on your online shop, people will have all the necessary questions answered, decreasing the workload for people in the customer support department.

Besides needing a lower number of people in customer support, you are also going to liberate your business from frequent support calls, which not only take away time from your team, but also carry a certain cost for your company.

 

• Conversion rates

 

Conversion rates are important part of any online store. If you attract millions of people and your conversion rates are low, you are not going to maximize profits of your online store. However, if you implement a knowledge base, the available information will passively affect your customers and turn your online store into a place where they want to purchase products and services.

The increase in conversion rates is something that every online business is striving towards. If you want to run a successful business, knowledge base should definitely be included in your online store.

These are some of the reasons why a knowledge base is important in the ecommerce business. If you want to achieve business growth, it is essential to continually work on customer satisfaction and offer top notch services. This is why it is necessary to implement a knowledge base in your online shop. It makes your business better, but more importantly, it is also beneficial for people who end up on your website.

Author Bio:- Robin is a Technical Support Executive with a combined experience of 6 years. He currently works with Live2Support – a live customer and sales chat software by ProProfs. In his free time, Robin enjoys reading and traveling.

The healthcare industry uses its fair share of contractors at all levels. Using outside staff and services is a matter of convenience, and it allows the healthcare facility to focus on taking care of patients. It’s important that contractors understand that they are held to the same rules and regulations as the facility, including HIPAA. While incidental viewing isn’t something that’s punishable, leaving patient information out in the open is. Every contractor from IT to laundry services needs to follow HIPAA at all times in order to avoid fines. Following are three things contractors need to know to stay within HIPAA compliance.

What Information is Protected by HIPAA?

Protected health information, or PHI, is information that cannot be released without consent of the patient. Personal identification that includes the first and last name, address, phone number, and Social Security information falls under the definition of PHI. Conversations between physicians and patient are confidential as are prescribing and financial records.

The only people who are allowed to view PHI is the physician, nurses, and office staff. The information cannot be released to anyone outside of the facility unless permission has been granted by the patient. Any unauthorized release of information can subject the offender and the facility to fines.

Defining Who Is and Isn’t a Contractor

The general rule of thumb for defining a contractor is someone who cannot be controlled by their employer. That is, the employer does not take out payroll deductions and the contractor can come and go as they please. The other definition of a contractor is an outside agency that’s been retained to perform a service. Services can include cleaning of the facility, laundry services, document shredding, and more.

People who are paid a regular wage, have payroll deductions, and work on a pre-defined schedule are employees. They lose the freedom to come and go but gain defined benefits in the form of paying taxes and Social Security.

Both contractor and employee have to follow HIPAA at all times. It’s doubly important for a contractor to pay attention to HIPAA as they have more freedom to come and go, and can be considered a higher risk than an employee. A data breach that’s attributable to the employee or contractor comes with the same results: fines and potential for prosecution.

Creating a Plan of Action to Prevent Accidents and Leaks

The key to preventing problems is education. Make sure employees are familiar with HIPAA, and if not, make plans to educate them. Make sure that contractors are educated in HIPAA before working with them. If a contractor isn’t versed in HIPAA, don’t work with them until they can prove they are. The same goes with IT services and electronic health records. Always work with contractors who know their duties before they step foot in the facility.

Patient privacy is a serious issue, and one that everyone needs to keep on top of regardless of whether they’re a contractor or employee. Always stay on top of compliance protocols in order to prevent fines and protect sensitive information.

Your goal as a business owner is to keep your bottom line in the black, which means you need to increase sales and reduce operating expenses. Although there are still small enterprises whose owners love the idea of doing things manually, most stores today use one type of point of sale (POS) system. Depending on your cash position, you can either rent or buy a point of sale system that is suited to your type of business.

Automation

Using a POS system has many advantages over the traditional method of just using a manual cash register. With a POS system you can automate most tasks, which helps in reducing your overhead costs as you only need to hire staff for tasks that cannot be done automatically, such as serving customers and manning the checkout counter. You do not have to assign a staff to collate sales reports because you can generate that automatically, freeing your staff from the additional task and enable him or her to attend to customers. An integrated POS system is also capable of inventory management and cash reconciliation.

Next generation software

Moreover, most POS systems today are next generation software, thereby there are more features and innovations worked into the program to make the software more efficient and responsive. These additional features are meant to help retailers to further improve and raise their sales and net income through increasing their geographical reach and sales volume. Built-in as well is better customer service.

How a POS system increases sales

Extends your geographical reach – with its new features, you can integrate an ecommerce website into your POS system. This allows your customers to shop anytime and outside of your regular operating hours. Your customer base will increase because you are not limited to serving just the customers in your locality who can reach your physical store but those who live somewhere else. You can program the POS system to simplify your online checkout, which help greatly in preventing online customers from abandoning their shopping carts.

Improves your customer relations management (CRM) – a POS system allows you to provide better service to your customers, from always having their favorite products in stock, to reminding cashiers to upsell or provide you with customer information like birthdays and special occasions – things that will increase customer patronage and loyalty.

Use it as a marketing tool – you can build a customer database using a POS system and generate customer details that you can use for mass email or mass marketing campaigns. If you have newsletters, you can have an opt-in on your website and send newsletters automatically to customers who opted in to your service. You can send emails announcing exclusive discounts, special offers, anniversary sale or new products. These are marketing tools to encourage your customers to spend more money in your store.

Create customized receipts – when you have a POS system you can use a feature of the receipt printer to add a customized message at the bottom of the receipt. It can be a coupon, a discount voucher for the next purchase, an invitation to check out your website or answer a customer survey.

Serves as sales prompts – the flexibility, responsiveness and additional features of a POS system allows retailers to set it up with sales prompts. These are short reminders to cashiers to promote loyalty cards, add-ons to the purchase or announce particular or new products, all geared towards increasing sales for the day or to encourage customers to visit the store frequently.

When you’ve chosen your POS system carefully, it will become a critical part of your retail business operation. Not only will your customer base widen, a good POS system will turn you into  a very effective marketer. Ensure that your POS is well implemented as it will result in increased sales volume, lower marketing expenditure and a smoother business flow process.