Small to medium businesses are on the rise, and with it comes the troubles that plague many business owners. Many efficiency tools are still exclusive to big companies and it can be difficult for SMEs to optimize their workflow. Fortunately, the current state of technology empowers many small businesses and allows a fighting chance for an efficient workflow. If there’s a problem that’s plaguing a business, there’s most probably a cheap but reliable solution to it using technology.
You should know how technology can solve problems that affect your business. By using these tips, instead of adding to your business expenses, it can go to paying mortgage loans or other necessary expenses. After all, with unnecessary expenses minimized and an efficient system, you can make your income margin bigger.
Having trouble with: Having Trouble Keeping Track of Inventory?
Why not try: Open Source Inventory and Management Software
Keeping track of inventory is among the most vital parts of a business. If you’re not aware of how much stocks you have, your business is in danger of always running low on stocks. No matter how much your business is popular you won’t be able to expand it unless you can actually deliver.
A potential and cheap, solution to this is to take advantage of open-source inventory software. There’s a wide variety of free inventory software regularly maintained by developers from all over the globe. If you’re not comfortable using open source software, there are also proprietary inventory and management applications that are accessible on multiple platforms. This ensures you can keep track of your inventory across different devices- be it a smartphone, tablet, or computer.
Having trouble with: Customer Count Too Low?
Why not try: Online Marketing
Customers keep the business alive, after all the profit comes from them. However, many factors are affecting the number of consumers walking in and using your business. Your company visibility and awareness will decide the number of clients, so how can you increase that?
Many small-to-medium businesses successfully utilize online advertising to their benefit, and it might just work for you. Knowing your target audience is crucial to online advertising, as one of its most used features is target marketing. Advertising to people who are more likely to use your services can yield better results, and turn leads into actual sales.
Having trouble with: Spending Too Much on Office Supplies?
Why not try: Go Paperless with Tablets
Small expenses like paper, pen, paperclips, and other office materials might seem minute. But if you add them together, you’ll realize how much money you’re actually spending on something that’s rendered obsolete by technology.
Instead of buying reams of papers and boxes of pens every month or so, you can help cut expenses and even automate many parts of your business by going paperless and digital. Tablets can do more than paper can. It keeps and stores your data so you never lose it, it can connect and sync your information making accessing them faster, and they’re multipurpose. They can be used to track inventory, check your advertisement stats, and many more.
Having trouble with: Running out of Storage for Company Data
Why not try: Use the Cloud
We think we have enough storage until the day we can’t save enough of our files in a hard drive. For a data-heavy company, this is a major problem. And even if you buy a horde of hard drives and USB sticks, you’ll run into the problem of having to sort the files you need out of a pile of storage media.
Using the Cloud for your storage and data needs will help streamline everything. Being a cloud platform, anyone with user access to your company data can make use of the files contained- no matter what device they’re using. And for a relatively cheap amount, you can have large data capacities, with the safety of backup too since many cloud storage companies offer backup services.
Having trouble with: Communication and Correspondence
Why not try: Use Digital Communication Platforms
Keeping your workforce together is difficult. It’s hard to juggle people’s personalities and have them communicate. However, since collaboration and correspondence is part of keeping a company together, you need to find a way to make people meet.
Using digital communication platforms can help you in this part. Since the Internet is such a necessity nowadays, everyone has access to it almost 24/7. By using online communication tools, you can keep communicate better and leave announcements and other work-related information in a single hub. You can also have non-work related banter to allow for making deeper social connections among coworkers. Being that it’s a place where they can communicate and build on each other’s ideas, it’s the best platform for collaboration and communication.