4 ways to reduce the administrative burden of your SME

Have you ever wondered how much time and money you’re losing with administration each week? Personnel administration, getting invoices paid in a timely manner, client follow-up, maintaining your client database, … Dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s can quickly take up a few hours of your day. As a result, many companies dread it.

SMEs are dreaming of a simple, more efficient administration that lightens the workload and contributes to the quality of customer relationships in a positive manner.

We all want to work more productively. However, we tend to forget the amount of administration employees deal with has a direct effect on their productivity. In fact, less paperwork is an important condition to work more efficiently. Research from Microsoft indicates that 26% of SME employees claim to work more productively if they have fewer administrative chores to tackle.

Fear no longer for an administrative hell, things will get better. There are various ways to tackle a mountain of paperwork and ensure your employees work more efficiently. Digitizing your administration is the way forward.

The main cause of time-consuming administration is messy, fragmented data. Being unable to find the right data, with folders floating around, missing out on a sales deal because important data often slips through the cracks, … we could go on for hours.

That’s why you need to turn CRM (or Customer Relationship Management) into the beating heart of your administration. The principle behind it is easy: manage all your data from one place. In reality, all your data about your customers, suppliers, etc. is stored and managed in just one system. This way, you’ll never lose any data and be able to easily share it with your colleagues. Connect your CRM software with other tools such as your bookkeeping package or your mailbox to get a 360° view of your administration.

Each day, a wide range of important files is sent out: quotations, invoices, payment reminders, you name it. Manually having to draft, modify and send each of these files can be time-consuming and tricky.

A common scenario: you notice an unpaid invoice that’s long overdue and still have to manually send a reminder. In the end, you‘ll still need to wait several days before you finally see your money. In the meantime your suppliers expect you to pay in time. Not really optimal for your cash flow.

You can easily avoid this by sending documents online. Why? Sending, singing and paying invoices is almost free. Adjustments are easily made and a document is signed in the blink of an eye. A payment has been fulfilled? Receive a notification right away and send a thoughtful thank you message. Speed up the entire process - from purchase to payment. At the end of the day, it will even save you money.

In addition to inbound mail, there are hundreds of important files that - as fate would have it - are nowhere to be found when you need them the most. Each company can benefit from storing files online so you can easily find them back. Working digitally also implies digitising documents, so you can access them from anywhere, at any time. A (near) paperless office will leave your business less vulnerable to theft and able to protect its customer data much more efficiently.

Another key, time-consuming task is your personnel administration. Every month, a massive amount of payslips are sent out. Introducing digital HR is a smart move for entrepreneurs to get a better grip on administration and focus more on the details.

With digital HR you let your employees do the work for you: requesting holidays, adding sick leave, keeping your employee information up to date, registering your hours worked, ... You can organise all of this via just one, online portal. It’s easy as pie; employees just ask to leave themselves, and with one click only, a manager can grant his approval. Another big plus: all these adjustments and additions are automatically taken into account with each pay slip. Not only will this stimulate a healthy working relationship, but your colleagues will also enjoy more autonomy and greater responsibility.

An organised, well-oiled digital administration works much more effectively. What’s more, it offers a more pleasant customer experience and safeguards the safety of all your customer data. Another really important advantage: it saves you loads of time (and money). Ready to take your business to the next level and digitise your entire administration?