5 Steps to Automate your Business – Digitize your Work Process

Are you a business owner and struggling with daily firefighting? Well! It’s  the right  time to automate your business to save hours from these small managerial tasks and  invest it in growth oriented tasks. Automation means incorporating systems and tools to your traditional business operations to save the time and effort of your team while enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of the workflow. 

Here, I came up with the 5 steps to automate your business, let’s have a look at them one by one:

What are the 5 steps to automate your business?

1. Data Capturing

How do you capture your data? Generally, companies capture the data in some excel files and word documents, without any format. Sometimes, these excel and doc files may get corrupted or the data captured without any format requires good effort to understand.
To resolve this, you can use Google Forms & Google sheets to capture the data. Create a Google Form with the basic questions you would like your client to answer in order to gather the information. Share this form with your client and let him fill it at his own comfort. You can connect this form with Google sheets and boom! , your well formatted data is captured safely on cloud. 

2. Data Management

Storing the data and updating it is another hectic task. If the file gets corrupt you may lose very important data or if someone has updated it and you want to check the previous versions, you cannot get it. You always need the system, in which you have saved the file to access the data.

But if you store it on Google Drive, firstly, your data is stored safe on the cloud. Data saved in Google Sheets or Google Docs on Google Drive can only be accessed by authorized person. You can share it with your team, defining them the authentication to view only or edit the file. You can always go back to the previous versions of the file, and monitor the edits made by your team.

3. Approval

Any operation in the workflow requires approval from senior members of the team. There might be a situation when your team needs urgent approval but you’re unavailable. 

To sort out these communication issues, there are some add-ons in Google Workspace to create approval metrics. Your  work will not suffer even in your absence.

4. Notifications and Reminders

Are you investing your day in following up with your team for their 'to-do list' ? The small businesses and start-ups do not have any  predefined work processes and therefore, the team works only when the work is delegated and tasks are followed up with them. This way the business owner wastes most of his time in micro-managing the business instead of focusing on macro growth oriented tasks.

Google has the solution for this problem also. You can set the reminders on Google calendar and send notifications on Gmail to your team to follow-up for their to-do list. Google Forms can also be used to delegate tasks to your employees and their subsequent follow ups. There are certain add-ons on Google Workspace that can be set up with Google Sheets, Google Forms and Google Notes to send notifications and reminders using Gmail as well.

5. Data Visualization

 Business reporting is the integral part of business operations. You always need to see the report of the day or week or month or year to make future plans and work strategies. What is the status of your sales, how many leads you have and what is the conversion rate, what is the performance rate of your team, etc.? To get answers to these questions you need a report system where you can track data on various parameters and metrics.
Google does this too. Google Data Studio, Google Business Page, Google Analytics, etc. are the reporting tools where you can track all whereabouts of your business.

These 5 steps if implemented properly, can help you automate your business with Google Applications. Learn more on how can you automate your business processes using Google Applications. Remember, Automation is the key to survive in this remote working period. You can get your systems and tools ready by just signing up for Google Workspace.