When your business hires a professional specialist such as a nurse, engineer, designer, or analyst, you want them to spend the bulk of their time doing tasks related to their role, not doing paperwork.
While it’s probably impossible to eliminate bureaucracy and still maintain the records necessary to successfully and legally run a business, it’s certainly possible to streamline and automate processes to keep time spent on them to only what is necessary.
Online forms and automated workflows are the keys to ensuring that necessary recordkeeping and accounting of time and resources are done thoroughly, but efficiently. Taking the time to automate and streamline workflows ensures not only a cleaner, leaner operation, but that your employees can focus more fully on putting their unique skills to use.
Here are some of the ways online forms and workflows help your business focus on core competencies.
By Ensuring Consistency
When you create an automated workflow for, say, creating a purchase order, you ensure that whoever starts the process will complete all necessary steps, in the right order. That means that the person who approves the process will always have a consistent set of information to consider.
Furthermore, automated workflows ensure that every user knows exactly what is expected so that over time, they’re able to do their part of the workflow with increasing efficiency, benefiting everyone.
By Minimizing Error-Tracing
Online forms can be designed to minimize input errors and ensure that exceptional situations are handled consistently. Suppose that purchase orders over $1,000 require departmental approval before final approval can be granted. When someone submits a purchase order over that amount, the form can flag it and trigger an automatic sub-process that sends the information to the department head for approval before it rejoins the workflow for further processing. What’s more, online forms themselves reduce errors due to poor handwriting or mistakes in transferring handwritten information into spreadsheets or databases.
Finding, tracing, and correcting errors with paper processes wastes time that could be better spent on other tasks.
By Creating an Audit Trail
Few things disrupt business operations like an audit. Fortunately, you can create automated workflows that add time and date stamps to process steps, ensuring you always have an accurate and complete record that all necessary steps in a process were completed. You can also design automated workflows so that only authorized users can access them, and so that their participation in the workflow is automatically recorded. That way if an audit does occur, there’s no frenetic scrambling to collect records and proof, because it’s all already there.
By Eliminating Paper Shuffling
Finally, online forms and automated workflows eliminate one inefficiency that plagued businesses for generations: paper handling. Online forms won’t be lost, damaged, or coffee-stained, and they won’t disappear under a pile of mail on someone’s desk. There’s no taking completed papers to someone’s office for signatures, or accidentally leaving originals on the copy machine. The elimination of physical paperwork alone represents a tremendous efficiency gain on the part of most businesses.
PerfectApps is online form and workflow software that is user-friendly, powerful, flexible, and that requires no programming. The drag-and-drop interface ensures that the people who actually use the forms and workflows can have influence in their design, which is valuable because these are the people who know where the bottlenecks can occur, and which steps need to occur in which order.
If you’re ready to maximize time spent on core business competencies and reduce the time and resources required to handle necessary business processes, we invite you to watch the PerfectApps demo video. It only takes a minute, and you’ll see for yourself how online forms and automated workflows can transform day-to-day business operations.
