BUSINESS MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE
As a startup founder or a small/mid-size business owner, the most important thing, aside from growing sales, is cutting costs and keeping them as low as possible. Increasing efficiency and productivity to achieve high profitability is the gate to the elusive competitive edge.
You want to spend the least amount of money and get the best results because the future is uncertain. Sales often stagger, machinery breaks; human errors, inventory disappears or goes dead on your shelves.
Throughout the years, I’ve encountered so many uncertainties that damaged and often toppled businesses. That is why everyone is talking about automation and A.I. – they want to save on costs.
Filling out invoices, storing customer data, sending emails, extracting information from email replies, and manipulating all that data is no easy task. Juggling reports, payroll, accounting, and sales calls at the same time is time consuming, littered with errors, and takes a lot of people in not so productive and efficient hands.
You want to be cost effective.
You could outsource back-office or front-office functions to another company. it will make you dependent on service providers. They too have the same struggles as you – qualified, abled, and effective manpower. You’ll be competing with their other clients to get your job done.
You have two clear options:
- Buy/lease/subscribe to canned software.
- Develop software in-house.
HOW TO MAKE SOFTWARE FOR BUSINESS?
Run a search on the web, google it, ChatGPT it, or ask any other robot with answers to the secrets of the universe, there’s no easy answer.
1. shrink-wrapped or canned software – these are your one size fits all programs. They come with long and expensive subscriptions, carrying a promise to mitigate the complexities of running a business, but getting you hooked on their products.
You input all your data into these programs, and then realize there’s so much more you need from the software applications in order to run your business more efficiently.
Ideas run through your brain, neurons exploding, synapses delivering messages at light speed. You know exactly what needs to be done to make this software do what you need it to do. Then you discover that the specific button, that genius function that could have simplified everything, is just not there.
If you want it there, you’ll have to wait for hundreds of clients like yourself to request the same button with the same function for that provider to put it in its program.
2. The pricier way – shop around companies offering access to hundreds of developers and have them do the work for you. Hire developers and have them develop in-house software, which is definitely the right way to go, but it takes a long time and boat loads of money.
Software engineers are highly paid. In the United States, that means six-figure salaries. The costs of finding and hiring engineers involve search firms, which charge 15% to 30% of the first year’s salary. For the past several years, even they’ve been struggling to find good candidates.
Another way is to roll your own code, learn a programing language and DIY. Harvard Business Review has a great article about these obstacles: https://hbr.org/2021/12/when-should-your-company-develop-its-own-software
MOST USEFUL SOFTWARE FOR BUSINESS
Don’t get me wrong, the software applications out there are amazing and very useful, but they’re not best for everyone, one size does not fit all.
Each business, each startup, moves at its own pace according to the level of computer savviness dictated by its founders and their budget.
What if you’re an attorney making his/her baby steps for a well-organized home office. A professional taking the first steps of setting up operations out of your garage. Maybe you are a 50-person warehouse that’s been around for a hundred years, relying on abled hands to smooth up operations.
Your focus should be on your product and driving sales, not entering data, and worrying about errors.
You don’t know what you don’t know, and you don’t know what kind of function or button you’ll need two months from now. Business owners need a provider to go to when they have questions or ideas about how to improve their software to better fit their needs. Someone to ask can we get this done, can we add that, can we make the program do this, I need it this way, can we do that…?
What if you could have a software that not only simplifies your invoicing process but also sends it to accounting. It crunches the numbers and imports into QuickBooks. It stores all imperative texts and numbers in a database from which you can extract data when you need it. Then it fills out invoices and handles client relationship management. It prints out reports, visualizes data, creates business modeling for better decision making, and integrates with all other software. All with the clicks of a few buttons.
What if I tell you, you already have that program on your computer.
WHAT SOFTWARE DO MOST BUSINESSES USE?
The obvious answer would be Microsoft Excel. You can do anything with a spreadsheet. It’s also cheaper than any other program. When in the right hands, Excel has no limits for applications and can be simplified to a degree that anyone can use it, even if they have no computer background or spreadsheet knowledge.
Rumor has it that 1.5 billion people use Excel. Any enterprise uses Excel because of its flexibility and ease of use. Any division function in any industry can benefit from Excel.
Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO has proclaimed it Microsoft’s most important consumer product.
Why is that?
- You can get what you need fast – no waiting for CTO’s, or teams of developers.
- Big systems are perfect for capturing and delivering big, clean data – Excel outputs results.
- Every system has a button that prompts “Export to Excel” for a reason.
Tech Giants such as Oracle, Amazon, Intel, and accounting and consultation superpowers such as Deloitte use excel to crunch and manipulate data and make forecasts for better decision making.
ChatGPT integrates with Excel.
Every canned software from Quickbooks to Tableau has a button that exports and imports to Excel.
Check this useful link to corroborate my words.
https://medium.com/swlh/who-runs-the-world-microsoft-excel-f8cf2685d013
CUSTOM SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT FOR SMALL BUSINESS
The best thing about Excel is its flexibility. Don’t think of it as just a spreadsheet. Think of it as a platform where you can custom-build everything to suit a specific need.
It can simplify the way you enter data, and then manipulate that data for your business needs. It streamlines operations, runs accounting and invoicing, and sends the output data to anyone that might benefit from it.
Instead of hiring accounting and CRM managers with high salaries; that’s not cost effective. You can design your own program out of Excel, tailor-made for your business needs for a fraction of what you’ll shell on the other options.
It harbors a way to simplify all business processes, and I’m not talking about Excel templates.
Excel can run on your iPhone. You can have all your contracts emailed directly from Excel while keeping all the information in a database to use it in the future. You can take pictures on your phone of data tables in a PDF or text file and have all the numbers in Excel worksheet ready to be analyzed.
https://www.morebusiness.com/how-to-build-custom-software-applications-for-your-small-business/
HOW CAN A NEW STARTUP BENEFIT FROM EXCEL?
Let’s coin the acronym EABS – “Excel as a Bridge Software.”
Much like a bridge loan is a short-term loan used until a company secures permanent financing. Bridge software is a program application that you quickly and easily set-up to close a gap of a specific need.
It smooths and streamlines operations; it bridges a gap you have while you work on developing your in-house program.
Back in 2015, a friend approached me. He nailed a job at the accounting department of a trading startup. He had to control all sales inflow, payroll, different currencies; extract, analyze, and visualize all that data.
The startup was working on developing its own software but needed a program to get the job done, fast.
I got to work and understood what they wanted to achieve. We developed an application program out of Excel that met all their needs. It was flexible in a way that they were able to add more functions and abilities as the business evolved.
They completed the development of their in-house program, which cost north of $2 million and lasted over a year. Even then, they still used the Excel program we created, over the span of a few weekends, because they still needed to dissect numbers and visualize the data tables. The data had to be manipulated.
If you’re working on finalizing your in-house software and have an interval or a gap that needs to be filled immediately, then Excel is the way to go.
SMALL BUSINESS ACCOUNTING SOFTWARE WITHOUT SUBSCRIPTION
I know what you’re thinking, Excel is overly complicated. It has functions and pivots, and if-statements, vlookups, concatenate, and complicated words and a steep learning curve. And you’ll be right.
Excel is complicated. But in the right hands it can be narrowed down to a few buttons on your screen that you click and get the job done for you.
As said so eloquently by the great Dr. Wayne L. Winston, “if you know excel, you don’t need any other software.”
Microsoft office suite can be bought for one lump sum or come with a subscription. For small businesses, paying $8-$12 a month will get you the full power of the office suite with sharing capabilities and power-automation, plus you’ll get a company vanity email and a lot of other goodies.
Excel meets all the accounting needs of your business. It can be built to fit your specific needs and adapt itself to complement anyone behind the computer at your accounting desk.
You’ll be able to manipulate and control all the data your business outputs, use it to fill out the right forms, and share it with anyone you feel like.
PAYROLL SOFTWARE FOR SMALL BUSINESS
You can create any payroll template that you may think of with your logo, and the fields that you want in your template.
With the click of a button, you can extract the numbers and move them to a database or a new worksheet. You can even sync your bank account into Excel to better control your expenses and costs.
Get a better understanding of the power of Excel in the following videos:
BUSINESS SOFTWARE FOR INVOICING
BEST CRM FOR SMALL BUSINESS
If you enjoyed this read, check out our new post on how to automate revenue cycle using excel.
Author
Asaf Antman is a pioneer of the alternative lending industry with more than two decades of extensive experience in the business world under his belt. Throughout his career, he dissected thousands of businesses; underwrote, analyzed, advised, negotiated debts, secured deals, and funded small to mid-size companies in a variety of industries and locations across the U.S.