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Three key symptoms that your business needs the cloud. Now.

Cloud Computing - 1
hmrc

The cloud is transforming the way business works, but you might still be wary to try this innovating new system. Here are three symptoms that can help you self-diagnose whether it’s time to take the plunge and move on.

Listen up business leaders. Have you ever thought that the multiple apps and products that you use to manage the customer data and information, could actually be preventing your business from growing and thriving? Well, I hate to tell you this, but they very much could be.

Even though to begin with these may help you manage key information such as financial, customer and sales data, 0as your business increases in size, your needs will inevitably become more and more complex- and these multiple platforms may simply not be able keep up.

They say all good things must come to an end, so it may be time to move on – move onto an innovating, fresh new system where all this key information into a place that everyone can access securely, no matter what time or place.

This will then be able you be truly able to focus all of your energy into what is actually important to your business’s success: great customer service and well-informed, quickly made decisions which will help your business develop.

In this article, we shall examine the three key symptoms that indicate that you have outgrown your current system and should seriously consider moving to a new different, new, exciting system – the cloud.

Symptom One: Wasting Valuable Time

No successful business leader would make crucial decisions for their business based on historic or a finite amount of information, would they? None the less though, many managers are still spending countless hours studying and trying to make sense of financial and sales information from multiple apps and products – hours that could be better spent helping the business advance and thrive.

By using multiple products and apps, not only are you limiting the ways in which the financial and sales teams can efficiently interact and cooperate with each other –creating a degree of separation in the business – but you are also increasing the chance of potentially costly mistakes and errors being made with how the team works together for the business.

Having no central storage place for this information means that individuals and teams may be forced to report their information separately as they may not have the same access to data. It could even mean that they are basing their reports on historical information; which in turn could have harmful consequences for your business.

This incoherent method of working makes it more time-consuming, stressful and difficult for you to successfully bring together all of the information you will need in order to be able to make reliable, informed decisions that could be crucial for the future success of your company.

Symptom Two: Wasting Time on the Wrong Things

Using multiple apps and products means that countless hours are wasted by team members within the business inputting key account information in many different places at the end of every month or quarter.

Don’t you think that this time could be spent more wisely within the business? Freeing up this time could mean that you could respond more quickly to sales enquiries, prepare the accounts of major clients as well as discuss fresh ideas for sales promotions – all of which could help your business advance and grow.

Think about it. Do you really think that it’s a valuable use of you and your finest team members time manually inputting expenses or carrying out other lengthy, unproductive tasks? Or could that time be better spent on tasks that will help your business flourish and shine?

Symptom Three: Struggling to Connect

Naturally, as the leader of a developing business, you are always trying your best to implement the most efficient processes for your business. Despite this, you may never have thought about the way in which team members share key information with each other.

Consider this example: a business might use one product to store financial data about its clients and their clients but employees may use a completely separate product to bring together current information linked to the clients in their day-to-day work.

This creates a very messy, confusing system as multiple employees are working on and editing lots of different versions of customer information in a number of different places.

This means that even if you have the most efficient employees who never make mistakes and always remember to update every product, which again is very time-consuming, they are still presented with a huge challenge in trying to share recent customer information internally.

Today’s growing businesses need a more efficient way to sharing and collaborating customer information – and that way is the cloud.

What is the answer to these problems?

So now that we have addressed these key symptoms, you are probably sitting there thinking ‘what can I do to address these issues?’. Well, it’s simple really. All you have to do is scrap your old way of storing sales and financial information on multiple products and apps and move to an effective cloud-based accounting system, such as Xero.

By doing this you will not only be helping your team work together and collaborate more easily, but you will also reduce the risk of business errors and make your team more productive.

Not only this though, you will also be better equipped to make crucial business decisions without wasting valuable time searching for information and spend that time on things that will help your business grow, succeed and shine.

So although a once good thing may be ending, when you move to a secure, better-connected cloud-based accounting system, such as Xero, you will soon realise how much it is helping your business and wonder why you didn’t move sooner.