Skip to content 
by Iryn Ureta | Apr 30, 2018 | 0 comment
Are you a business owner whose business depends largely on paper documentation (affectionately known as ‘the paper trail’)?
Do you struggle with managing the ebb and flow of seemingly endless paper documents? How do delays in having paperwork completed and returned back to you affect your business?
If staff don’t complete their paper timesheets or submit their expenses with receipts, does that impact upon your job profitability and invoice timeliness? If so, then it may be a great time for you to consider having a mobile app for your business. Stopping the paper trail and going paperless will help you realise cost savings and efficiency gains.
Improve Your Business, The Paperless Way
Many businesses these days are unearthing real value by going digital whilst their competition is left behind chasing the paper trail. Placing orders, invoicing, inventory management and reconciliation, payables and receivables management and timekeeping are just a few of the many processes businesses handle on a day-to-day basis. Given that these processes generally span all company departments across all its locations, then consider how a single mistake, delay, or lost document can then upset the whole business process flow and efficiency.
As the number of your customers and suppliers increases, the natural tendency is that communication and data collection will continually become less efficient and costlier. Consider a company using manual timesheets, order books or job sheets as an example. For each new customer, supplier and staff member, the inefficiencies across the organisation compound, as does the risk of something vital going missing.
With a paper trail, processes are essentially intertwined and are largely driven by the reliance on receiving a document from another team prior to being able to work further on that job. Inevitable delays and breakdowns in processes occur when paper documents ‘go missing’ and set off a chain reaction that affects the entire enterprise — inflating the time and costs of doing business.
In a survey conducted by Nitro, “the first and leading Adobe Acrobat™ replacement” company, “more than 70% of technology leaders agree that digital transformation is a priority, with less than 10% finding digital transformation efforts to be minimal or unimportant.” (Nitro Digital Transformation Survey)
So how about having a mobile app for your business that can eliminate tediously and ‘unprofessional looking’ paperwork, reduce your on-going costs and make your business run more efficiently?
5 Common Paper Trail Challenges Affecting Your Business Growth
Regardless of how large or small a business is, the staff has several common concerns regarding manual business documentation processes and these factors can greatly affect the growth of your business.
1.Visibility
Who has the sales order? Is this everything related to the job to be invoiced? Where are all the expense receipts? These are just a few of the many problems that may be encountered by your staff when processing a simple business document. So how do you deal with issues such as missing orders, invoices, timesheets or receipts?
2.Errors
Making errors or incurring delays is inevitable when relying on manual document processing. There is always a risk of human error that ends up stretching out the business cycle and driving up operating costs. These errors obviously delay productivity and directly impact cash flow, supply chain performance and morale.
3.Productivity
Optimising the productivity of document processing and reducing the potential for delays and missing paperwork will greatly affect the quality of your service, professionalism and efficiency. When did you last complete a paper form, hand it to someone (like the receptionist at a doctor’s surgery for example), only to then watch and wait for them to type in everything that you wrote? How inefficient and unprofessional does that look?
4.Cost
Everyone is looking to cut operating costs and do more with less. Very few staff these days are not already equipped with a smartphone, tablet or laptop, so why not make better use of what you already have, simply by utilising those existing technologies?
Unnecessary paperwork, along with the costs of document storage, secure shredding, labour, printing equipment and materials can be eliminated by having your own dedicated mobile app.
5.Digital Transformation
Transforming the paper trail to a paperless digital document process requires a flexible solution that is easy to deploy and use. A custom mobile app will help to automate internal processes and introduce greater efficiencies, and perhaps even make your dealings with your customers and suppliers more efficient.
Making a Success Out of Your Mobile Application
Adopting a digital transformation strategy is now a priority for many forward-thinking companies and it could be for your business too. A custom-built mobile application can integrate all the required transactional processes for your business. From raising a purchase order, to order receipt and stocktaking, and from creating a sales order to timekeeping, expense management, assigning a bill of materials to ultimately invoicing and payment processing can all be digitised for your business.
“By enabling all employees to work digitally, IT can help bridge the gap between an organization’s people and its processes, alleviating common barriers to productivity.” (Nitro, Delivering on Digital Demands)
Benefits of digitising your paper trail:
- Less time spent on administration, follow-up and training
- Lower on-going operational costs
- Reduced error rates
- Less unproductive work
- Increased efficiency
- Greater level of consistency
- Higher accuracy
- Increased productivity
Although it may not be possible for every business to totally eliminate the paper trail a targeted reduction can increase business efficiencies and cost savings. Reducing paperwork or going totally paperless through your own custom mobile app can benefit your business and improve its profitability.
If you would like to know more, contact The Mobile Apps Man today. We are an app development company that can help take you on this digital transformational journey.
