It has been clear for a number of years that the future of business is digital. Many companies today are online-first, and so are digital by nature, but many others remain stuck in the pre-digital era and they are missing out on significant efficiencies across the board. By digitising everything from marketing to invoicing and accounts payable, companies big and small can both generate more sales and save money at the same time.
1. Efficiency savings
There is a lot of administration behind running a business, with data retention important not just for internal business analysis but also a legal requirement to comply with tax regulations.
Traditionally all these administrative tasks have come with their own paperwork, with businesses required to hold onto every single document for at least five years. This meant thousands or sheets of paper spread across a number of filing cabinets, which made trying to find the right document when needed an difficult task and the whole process a significant burden on the company resources.
Digitisation fixes these problems. Documents are no longer stored on numerous bits of paper, all with different layouts and structures, but can all be saved to a single repository on the company’s own servers or in the cloud. Critically, storing a million documents is easy on a standard hard drive (backed up of course) and searching for the right document only takes seconds. Together these all add up to significant savings of time and money.
2. Scalability
Traditional processes do not scale well, with growing companies needing to employ more and more people in administration and accounting, slowing expansion and adding expense. Digital processes mean that fewer people can manage significantly more tasks, and each task can be completed more quickly. Trying to find a receipt from December 2017 takes five seconds to search rather than an hour to unlock the filing cabinet and sift through the paperwork. Digital processes, meanwhile, can scale almost without limit and with little additional cost and little human oversight – a very different prospect to keeping everything physical.
3. Automation
Automation saves money, but without digital processes there is little opportunity to automate at all. If you want to send out follow-up emails to clients that have not paid their bill within 28 days to nudge them to settle their bill, this can be done automatically if the invoicing is already digitised. No longer will someone have to sort through records manually to work out who has paid and give them a call, now the nudging can all be automatic.
Digital is the future and it’s here to stay.