Excel is now old news – and a customised back office solution could provide your business with the boost it needs to streamline your operations.

Excel is a go-to solution for many businesses.

It provides back offices the world over with an established tool to help you run your operations.

But Excel is now old news – and a customised back office solution could provide your business with the boost it needs to streamline your operations.

Back office automation software plays a significant role, helping businesses achieve this and massively streamlining your operations.

In this post, we examine how automation and other features associated with a custom software solution can help your business optimise its back end operations.

Why can’t we just use Excel?

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? You may think Excel is fit-for-purpose, but there are many benefits of back office automation software. Before we get to those, here are some of the ways in which your Excel system may be letting your business down:

• Lack of control and security
• Difficult to manage
• Susceptible to human error
• Difficult to troubleshoot or test
• Obstructive to gaining regulatory compliance
• Unfit for agile business practices
• Hinders collaboration between your teams
• Hard to consolidate
• Lacks business continuity
• Incapable of supporting quick decision making

If your Excel-based back office operations experience any of these issues, then it may be time to consider a customised back office automation software solution.

What is back office automation software?

Automation simply means that the software completes any tasks, instead of your human staff.

Many back office tasks are manual and repetitive, making them perfect candidates for automation.

Back office automation software streamlines your processes, helping you achieve cost and time savings.

It can also streamline communication between your team members, further boosting the productivity of your staff.

This has a knock-on effect, helping to improve your customer service by identifying and eliminating bottlenecks in your existing workflows.

Back office automation software is also not prone to human error, improving the security and storage of your data. This can help you increase compliance, lower your operating expenses and accelerate your cash flow management processes.

Where could you use back office automation software?

Every business is different, but there are often a handful of back office tasks that are perfect for automation. These tasks typically occur frequently, and are repetitive and labour intensive.

At Make IT Simple, we evaluate your existing back office tasks to determine which ones are suitable for automation. We only select established tasks with predictable operations, a history of success and known costs.

This is because, if we blindly automate a broken process, we may just make matters worse. Plus, you need plenty of historical data to measure the success of your automation. We also select tasks where your business can realise a high ROI and save money.

Let’s look at some strong back office automation software candidates now:

3 innovative and affordable back office automation software solutions:

1. Data entry

Data entry is one of the most repetitive, labour intensive and frequent back office tasks. It’s also prone to human error. Automation can significantly reduce your requirement for manual data entry.

For example, your customised back office automation software may process a transaction, manage data, trigger a response or communicate with another digital system.

An automated data entry system can be used across these back office operations, running across your human resources, finance and accounting, supply chain management, procurement, IT operations, and customer service teams, to name a few, and helping you realise widespread time and cost savings.

2. Staff management

Automation is a key tool for employee onboarding and offboarding too, helping you to increase staff retention rates and make a good final impression on departing staff, while ensuring you’re complying with the latest employment laws.

It also provides a consistent and seamless end user experience, where staff have the right information, at the right time.

3. Purchase orders

Purchase orders are another important example, where a request may need to be reviewed and signed by multiple parties. This is a time-consuming and inefficient process, where delays are common.

With automation, purchase orders are sent to the right people, automatically, and closed when they are complete. Automation also reduces the purchase order process from a few days to near instant.

Using back office automation software, your staff can focus on more strategic and high value tasks. Plus, costly data entry errors are eliminated.

In conclusion

If you want to automate your back office operations, we can develop the right customised solution for your business.

At Make IT Simple, we work with businesses to help them develop a range of bespoke software solutions.

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