This article was originally published in Your Business Magazine
Over the last number of years, many businesses have been driven into change through the likes of Brexit or Covid and have adapted and evolved. At the heart of these changes has been a shift to digital solutions and cloud based software.
Whilst this technology change has yielded many benefits for businesses up and down the country it has also led to companies having multiple cloud based solutions to manage their business. There could be systems for CRM (Customer Relationship Management), Finance, eCommerce, Point of Sale, HR Management, Customer Support, and more.
All of the systems that businesses have implemented collect and store data, such as a CRM system capturing every interaction with a customer, or every transaction being recorded from an eCommerce site. This is leading to a 61% increase in the amount of data available in companies (Accenture), but at least 70% of this data remains unused (Gartner).
Many of the most common cloud based systems will offer some kind of basic reporting within their packages to help companies see their performance or manage their customers effectively. But in order to maximise their reporting capabilities, you would need to subscribe to their top level packages. Something that is out of the scope of most businesses resulting in rich data being left unused in the systems.
Companies also require the ability to get information from multiple systems consolidated together in order to maximise it. For example, if you were selling online through an eCommerce platform, through a Point of Sale system in a shop and via invoice, you would have sales in three distinct places, which don’t have the ability to talk to each other. The result of this is people struggling to work out their best selling products, or how overall performance has changed as they are limited to a single channel view at a time.
The default for both of these situations, therefore, is to go back to Excel in order to try and maximise the data that is being collected. But trying to consolidate all numbers from multiple systems can be a challenge, even for the most skilled Excel user.
There are solutions to this problem, whereby there are services that will help you get the data out of a system and present it consistently in a grid, but someone in an organisation still has to process this. There still has to be technical knowledge of how to work with the data and present it in a way that maximises understanding and helps drive decisive actions. This is something that isn’t possible in all organisations, especially those who are new to data and new to reporting.
If you consider that many companies still spend an hour each day across their organisation manipulating spreadsheets to get reports to run they are spending 37 man-days each year simply updating Excel. That’s 37 days of copying and pasting numbers from one sheet to another. 37 days of checking that all of the formulas are still working as they should be. 37 days of sending out static reports to the business.
What could your business do with those 37 days back?
At Sontai we specialise in giving SMEs this time back. We provide cloud based dashboards and reports that plug and play into the systems that SMEs have moved to, such as Xero, Sage, WooCommerce, Shopify, HubSpot, Pipedrive, and more. Our dashboards don’t require any technical knowledge or IT support to get up and running making them accessible to every business, and stopping everyone from wasting time in spreadsheets.
We automate the data extraction, data manipulation and visualisation to provide visual, interactive reports that can improve decision making and drive action.
Click through to learn more about our Sales Performance dashboard, Finance Scorecard, CRM Report and Web Analytics.
Or book a free, no obligation demo with one of our specialists here – https://www.sontaidatasolutions.com/book-demo
