4 benefits of business process automation

Business owners have a lot to juggle every day—and it’s always changing. Luckily, there are business process automation (BPA) tools that can make your day-to-day easier. The term “automation,” still sounds a bit futuristic and robotic to some, but automation solutions are people friendly and simple ways to companies meet their business needs.

BPA is not as intimidating as it seems and its impact can have instantaneous benefits for big, midsize, and small businesses, helping them increase efficiency, boost productivity, and reduce operational costs.

In fact, your business is likely already using automated processes. From auto-filled forms to scheduling, business automation helps shave hours of unnecessary business process management tasks every workday.

What is business process automation?

Simply put, BPA is automation solutions that allow businesses to automate repetitive tasks and processes—increasing cost efficiency, reducing human errors, and adding visibility to workflows. When humans don’t have to complete these easy but mind numbing jobs, they’re able to focus on tasks that aren’t as easily completed by automation platforms. By using BPA, companies can simplify business processes to streamline workflows to free up time and resources. This often allows midsize and small businesses to focus on strategy and digital transformation initiatives, which can’t be automated. Read on to learn a few ways you can incorporate business automation tools at your organization.

Automate invoicing and bill pay for a healthy cash flow

Maintaining a healthy cash flow is critical for every enterprise, especially small businesses. Remembering to pay bills and send invoices can be overwhelming even for small companies. Imagine if your customer base suddenly doubled, so would the struggle to manage your finances.

This is where BPA comes in, business automation platforms can automate payment reminders and even autopay bills to avoid late fees. BPA automation solutions manage the full lifecycle of invoicing and payment to provide an accurate picture of your company’s cash situation and help maintain a healthy cash flow.

Spotlight: BPA in action

The owner of a midsize marketing agency adopted business automation software to process incoming and outgoing invoices to simplify and streamline their billing. They now have a complete bird’s-eye view of when money is coming or going, without manual labor on their end.

Increase payroll accuracy and save time with BPA

Processing payroll is time-consuming and requires a lot effort, when it’s not accurate it can negatively affect vendor relationships and employee satisfaction. Business automation platforms can automate the heavy lifting of processing payroll like calculating taxes, processing forms, and reporting. Using payroll automation solutions help you reduce human error to maintain accuracy and save time.

Spotlight: BPA in action

A small temp agency uses many contractors to provide workforce solutions. Due to past payroll mistakes, the agency lost several contractors. The owner implemented a BPA platform to automate payroll, reduce human error, and increase efficiency – while helping team members feel like a valuable part of the company.

Amplify customer satisfaction with BPA

One bad customer experience can result in the loss of repeat business and become much more costly if it is shared on social media. BPA customer service platforms minimizes missed customer relation opportunities that can damage your company’s image and revenue. Using automation platforms to help manage customer service workflows is budget friendly and efficient, eliminates human error and costs of employing a service team.

Spotlight: BPA in action

After losing clients due to missed service requests or delayed responses, a growing IT company implemented a BPA platform with an Artificial Intelligence (AI) chat bot and virtual assistant. This allowed them to automate simple service request responses and notify and hand-off complex issues to on-call service techs. By using BPA to automate customer support, they were able to streamline real-time support, reduce live support costs, elevate customer satisfaction, and improve retention.

Automate reports with BPA to accelerate growth

Accurately tracking KPIs is critical for growing your business sustainably, setting realistic targets, and meeting your business needs. BPA platforms can generate automated detailed reports with metrics to see how you’re doing against benchmarks and goals. BPA helps ensure accuracy while giving you a wholistic view of where you’re excelling, need to improve, and identify growth opportunities. Whatever goals you’re trying to meet, BPA reporting will help you get there more easily.

Spotlight: BPA in action

A midsize software startup wants to gain a better understanding of where they need to improve and where they’re succeeding. They don’t want to spend a lot of time or money to extrapolate data, and decide to use a BPA platform to automate reporting. By adopting BPA they have access to real-time insights to key metrics and can identify tangible actions to take to meet their business needs and goals.

Build a better experience with automated employee onboarding

Having a solid onboarding process is key for showing your team members that they matter. But Human Resources is often swamped with paperwork and miscommunications between departments, which can increase the rate of human error and leave new employees in the lurch. Employee onboarding automation can help reduce the amount of time-consuming tasks and bring employees on board quickly, improving productivity and efficiency across the business.

Spotlight: BPA in action

A global e-commerce organization wants to provide their sales team with the same stellar employee onboarding experience. After reviewing business needs with key stakeholders, they decided to integrate all of their human resources functions onto one platform. BPA helps them automate business processes from hiring to offboarding, creating an employee experience that was largely the same in the 30+ countries where they operated.

Start automating with QuickBooks

QuickBooks Online Advanced can help fuel digital transformation at your organization using business process automation so you have more time to focus on growth. Explore which QuickBooks solution can help your business save time, minimize human error, streamline processes, and increase efficiency.