VIDEO: How Automation Can Help Small Businesses Scale from Home

(Last Updated On: October 21, 2021)

If you’re a small business, automation is the super-power that can help you scale faster while keeping things organised. Even if you’re locked down at home, automation can help you keep things going. Here are 3 reasons why automation is vital for your growth.

Automation makes coordination systematic and easy

Automation lets your people switch from collaboration to coordination. What’s the difference?

Collaboration is where your people talk a lot so that they can execute something together.

Coordination is when there are systems and rules in place. And everyone knows what to do and when to do it. Your people do not need to figure out what needs to be done next, they just know it because there’s a system in place.

The result? Fewer mistakes and faster cycles. 

Collaboration is great during the planning stage. But it is not advisable during the execution stage, because it slows things down, and results in errors. You need to move to coordination, and automation can help you with this. 

What’s beautiful about automation is that it will:

• Help you design a system for your business process
• Let you set rules, so that people operate within a framework
• Enable you to gently guide people to take the right actions at the right time

All this will ensure that each person’s actions are in perfect sync with the next. This way, everyone knows what to do, when to do it and they are all working together in perfect harmony. 

Teams like Sales, Accounting and Customer Support can benefit greatly by switching from collaboration to coordination. 

The difference between collaboration and coordination with a flat tyre:

Collaboration is when 4 random people decide to change the flat tyre of a car. It is going to be badly organised. And the task will take about 15 minutes to accomplish.

Coordination is when there is a system in place. It is when a Formula 1 Racing Pit Crew changes a set of tyres. It takes less than a few seconds and the job is done in an incredibly efficient manner.

Automation can be a profit centre

Quick question: Which one of these 2 reimbursement filing methods takes more time?

Method A

• Bob fills his weekly expenses into a spreadsheet using a specific format.
• He then attaches it to an email. Sends it over to his boss.
• Along with the 30 other employees at his company.
• Spreadsheets are a pain to open on your phone, especially when you need to cross-check numbers.
• So Bob’s manager can’t approve stuff on the fly. He procrastinates the approvals.
• He finally approves them all a week later, which delays payments to everyone and adds to his stress
• Next, the accounts team has to manually copy and paste every expense, invoice and approval into their accounting software.
• And they need to spend time to make the right reimbursements to each employee.

Method B

• The entire process is automated.
• Every time Bob makes a spend, he snaps a picture of it using the expense app on his phone.
• Filing an expense takes less than 5 seconds.
• His manager can quickly approve expenses in his free time, when waiting in a line or riding a cab.
• And he can do it on his mobile phone, since there are no spreadsheets involved.
• Once it has been approved on the expenses app, automation ensures that these new expenses are synced into the company’s accounting software with zero-human effort.
• It automatically organises all the expenses, invoices copies.
• And it lets the accounting team complete their reimbursement process with a few clicks.
• What took weeks, would now take minutes from the accounting team.

Which method is faster?

Obviously, method B, is way faster. Bob’s company saves a lot of time and reduces a lot of stress by automating the expense management process.

What’s even better? They can now manage their accounting process with almost half the number of hours than before. This results in huge savings in cost for the company.

In a similar way, hundreds of complex processes in a company can be sped up and made more efficient using automation, thus resulting in large amounts of savings.

Automation will enhance work lives and improve company culture

The modern-day workforce is extremely intelligent and creative. They dread and despise ancillary tasks that reduce their productivity. Manual and repetitive tasks like data entry and excessive amounts of email. 

Your people don’t want to be copy-pasting data between excel sheets. Or answering emails throughout the day to keep their teams and bosses updated on their business process.

These ancillary tasks can make work very depressing for your employees. And it can hurt your company’s culture very badly.

You need to automate these repetitive tasks, so that your people can work on things that matter. And gain satisfaction from using their creativity and skills to grow your business.

Automation can really help companies become more efficient and more productive. 

“As a practitioner of workflow automation, I’ve personally used it to help many companies scale with grace. And the results have been very satisfying: reduced costs, happier customers, happier employees and greater efficiency,” Vinay Aggrawal, founder of Hubbler.mobi.

We discussed all that and more in this awesome Facebook LIVE session:

Join Instamojo’s mojoSeries to get notified about more webinars like this. You can also download a free ebook on the Top Automation Tools for 2020 below. Just click on the button to get your free ebook.

This post was contributed by Hubbler.mobi.

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