Inefficiency in a business often sneaks up on you.

You start off with a spreadsheet here or there to help you track revenue or to assist with project management and expenses. Before long, you’re repeating entry data across different systems and several spreadsheets.

Left to fester, these inefficient processes slow down your business. Sales, and naturally growth slows because your team doesn’t have the time to focus on bringing in more business alongside all the admin that’s now involved in their roles. Regardless of the industry you’re in, efficiency is key to a successful business. Without efficiency across the board, you’ll see compromises creeping in and the business will be wasting time, money, or both.

Make sure this doesn’t happen in your business – or rectify it if it already has – by keeping an eye out for warning signs of inefficiency and adopting the tools and software it requires.

Start with the basics

1.     Create a business plan (and stick to it)

A business cannot run efficiently, and will cease to be viable in the long-term, without a business plan.

Having a well thought out business plan in place essentially gives you an effective and realistic strategy for growth, which can be adapted over time to work with the progress of the business.

Without a business plan, you can’t make informed and strategic decisions, allocate budget to the right areas, or attract investors or lenders for funding when required.

2.     Familiarise yourself with the business’ finances

Core to any business is a quality financial management system.

Options like true cloud solution Sage Intacct provide businesses with the tools requires to unlock incredible growth.

With innovative features, powerful functionality, and extensive integration capabilities, Sage Intacct is a great example of how the right software solution can revolutionise a business.

For smaller, growing businesses that require the core functionality without additional bells and whistles, Sage Intacct Starter Edition is a fantastic solution.

3.     Follow up on outstanding payments

Customer loyalty and repeat purchases are vital and chasing a payment too quickly could mean you’ll lose valuable business.

With the help of an intuitive software solution, you can easily keep an eye on open orders and see which outstanding payments need to be followed up and when.

4.     Track sales

Tracking sales through your financial management software solution provides you with insights into market and product performance.

With these insights, you can make informed, strategic decisions on stock purchasing, promotions and more to prevent losses and see gains for your business.

5.     Invest in productivity

Whether your team is small, or rapidly growing with dozens of employees across multiple departments, if they aren’t able to work efficiently, neither is the business.

Investing in productivity frees up time, highlights where improvements can be made, and improves overall efficiency within the business over time.

Productivity tools don’t have to break the bank either and many of them can be integrated with your financial management software – along with other programmes used in the business – for a streamlined, collaborative approach.

6.     Integrate Sales & Finance

In business, sales and finance must be on the same page to allow the business to grow without restrictions.

With financial management solutions like Sage Intacct, your sales and finance departments can be seamlessly and instantly linked.

The Sage Intacct and Salesforce integration is deep and highly configurable, allowing your team to convert Salesforce quotes into Sage Intacct orders with a click, or automatically trigger invoicing and revenue recognition.

Sage Intacct and Salesforce create a smarter process, eliminating silos, barriers, delays and errors and works with your business so you don’t have to adjust processes to work with the software.

7.     Embrace automation

Automation is everywhere, and its benefits in business are endless.

For businesses that have been stuck in the past with old-school manual and paper-based processes, a solution like Sage Intacct that offers a fully automated quote-to-cash process with a time saving of up to 75% and an increase in cash flow.

8.     Let your sales team sell

In many companies, revenue recognition is becoming increasingly important – especially with new ASC 606/IFRS 15 mandates.

The Sage Intacct-Salesforce integration can recognise revenue at the right time and match it to the right expenses, so you don’t have to.

Your sales team simply enters and open and close date for an opportunity, and the software does the rest so they can focus on selling.

9.     Master project management

Poor project management loses clients.

With Sage Intacct Project Accounting, you can create and track customer projects from the Salesforce account screen and see individual project details.

With the automated and intuitive integration in place, you can establish proper workflows, track time and expenses, and keep track of actuals against estimates – made even easier with online access so your team can input data wherever they are.

Save time, keep projects on track and keep clients happy.

10.  Foster inter-department communications

Automatic bi-directional syncing from the Sage Intacct-Salesforce integration accelerates and streamlines collaboration between your sales and finance teams.

Whether data is inputted from Sage Intacct or Salesforce, it can be seen by everyone; sales orders and opportunities are tied together automatically, with Salesforce Chatter accessible within Sage Intacct to allow communication with context for rapid responses and resolutions.

11.  Introduce a single data store

It’s not uncommon for sales and finance to create and maintain separate stores of data on the same information in businesses where paper-based processes and spreadsheets are still used.

This creates a greater risk of error and miscommunication, and hours are wasted across departments in data entry where it already exists somewhere else.

Sage Intacct and Salesforce allows creation of items and data entry within one system, automatically syncing it to the other for access across the business.

As a result, time is saved and can be better utilised elsewhere, and conflicts and errors are reduced, if not eliminated.

It’s time to become future-forward and build a smarter business

The business landscape is changing so rapidly that we have to plan for the distant future as well as the immediate one.

Make sure your business is future-ready by starting your digitalisation journey and consider taking your software to the cloud if you haven’t already.

Implementing and integrating solutions like Salesforce and Sage Intacct can provide you with a more intelligent business and guarantee you greater productivity and increased revenue.

To discuss integration of Sage Intacct within your business, get in touch with Acuity Solutions at 01932 237110 or email marketing@acuitysolutions.co.uk.