How to Digitalize Your Business

Digitalization in business is the new advantage that most enterprises are adopting to stay ahead of the pack. Seeing as how competitive the business landscape is becoming with the advancement of technology, digitalization provides business owners with an edge through improved efficiency and productivity.

Digitalization is the process of improving operations processes by adopting IT solutions, equipment and consultancy services. It is capable of identifying gaps or potentials to maximise business output. Ultimately, digitalization can translate to better use of financial and human resources within an enterprise.

A large part of adopting digital solutions to improve your business depends on the nature of your business. This is because each type of business may present a unique set of challenges.

Here’s how you can get started if you’re running a traditional cleaning service business:

Before thinking about digital tools that can help elevate your business, you will need to evaluate existing daily processes. Figure out how each process depends on each other and what are the potential gaps that can be rectified with digitalization.

Having a big picture view of the process interdependencies can provide clarity on your digital transformation direction. For cleaning service, it could be bookings and invoicing. A digital booking app can help organise bookings and manage invoices to work together seamlessly to reduce man-hours.

User or customer experience in using your service is one of the more crucial elements in digitalization. Walking in your customers’ shoes through the process of acquiring your services can help you identify gaps and flaws in the system.

For instance, a traditional text message-based booking system can be riddled with human error. Miscommunication can affect aspects like booking times and the capacity of cleaning service, thus affecting customer satisfaction. Moving to a website or cloud-based booking system can eliminate the hassle of nitty-gritty tasks to provide optimal business output.

Once you have clear visibility on business processes and how they lean on the customer experience, you would be ready to embrace digitalization. Traditional methods of invoicing such as spreadsheets can be migrated into a one-size-fits-all solution such as Xero.

All sales invoices will be issued and documented on the cloud, thus eliminating the issue of missing invoices. Xero has cloud storage where you can store all documents online and eliminates the need to keep hard copies. Xero integrates with a popular payment gateway such as Stripe which allows the customer to make payment directly with their credit card. With bank feeds directly to Xero, your cleaning business can now reconcile your customer’s payment as and when they make the payment, whether through cheques or bank transfers. This can help with bookkeeping accuracy and provide better business clarity at the end of your financial year.

Xero also allows you to track your receivables listing to have an overview of invoices issued for the cleaning services, send statements of accounts to your customers automatically and email reminders on invoices. You can further leverage the data in Xero to understand your customer better such as their buying cycle and payment patterns.

Vodich focuses on understanding your business and provides a strategy and roadmap for your business digitalization journey. The process includes the implementation of digital solutions and training of your staff. Training material and a dedicated account manager will be provided by us to help your team embrace the new ways of working.

As financial data is paramount to the success of any business, we would generally kickstart the digitalization journey of businesses that do not using any cloud solution for accounting, with the adoption of a Cloud Accounting Software – Xero. Processes such as gathering data, importation of data, and training on the various functions of Xero adds up to about 2 to 3 months. Subsequent to the training, another 3-month period will be granted for support on the functions and utilization of Xero. The programme can also be tailor-made to suit the needs of your business should you find a specific method more effective and personal for your business.

The programme provides a critical first step forward and serves as a cornerstone in the business’ digitalization journey. Once your business and the team gets used to Xero and starts reaping its benefits, we will work on the next area of the business that digitalization and technology can help to improve.

As your business further embraces the digital change and adopts new technologies to further enhance itself, you would have built a culture of innovation and become innovators of your industry or vertical. This would help your business achieve its maximum potential by increasing efficiency and allowing you to channel more of your energy and time into areas of potential growth and development. Get in touch with our expert consultants today and realise your true business potential with digitalization.