Software consolidation in small businesses
Software consolidation can be complicated or simple, but, for small businesses, the overriding goal is always the same: faster and more efficient invoicing. Cash flow is critical as a small business, the more you can track your outstanding invoices, the better.
The need for software consolidation varies significantly depending on the company.
Automate and consolidate as much as possible
Companies use a range of tools for financial consolidation, such Excel, CRMs, Word processing software and specialty products. But no matter what tool a company opts to use, small businesses should strive for more automation.
Automation is a good idea for several reasons -- it's going to speed up the accounting process, and it'll also help ensure compliance.
So long as businesses have compliance, there's no need to go back and make corrections.
Excel is not a collaboration tool and consolidation is really a collaborative process - every element in the company is talking to the accounting software and saying, 'Here's what happened last month.'
By definition, using Excel is really a square peg in a round hole. Spreadsheets can break, and there is no simple way of recovering data or work performed on that sheet.
Small Businesses use consolidation software so they can innovate quickly without wasting time managing servers or being distracted from their business ideas.
Increasing investment in consolidating applications is a growing trend among both small and large businesses, according to Hewlett Packard. Through mergers and acquisitions they inherited a lot of applications and needed to bring some of them to end of life. They reduced the number of applications in their company from 7000 to 2000, and hope to reduce that number still further to just 1200.
The drive behind software consolidation was simple: Small businesses have been struggling to meet the costs of the huge integration projects needed to link together all the applications they needed. Integration costs are many times the cost of the software itself.
These days, small businesses favour integrated software and nothing is smarter than the intelligence of the cloud, in that it finally gives companies access to highly affordable, on-demand and always-updated software.
One major concern with reliance on the cloud is often overlooked. What happens to the business if your internet fails. Although rare, routers fail, ISPs have downtime, and computers break.
When developing 1BizApp key considerations included ensuring the software works even when the internet isn't available. Your data is always backed up and safe in the cloud, but if you can't access it then your business cannot function. 1BizApp syncs with the cloud whenever it can, but if the internet fails, it works locally until it can sync again, ensuring little or no downtime for your business.
As a consequence, software integration is no longer the massive issue that it once was.