The benefits of transitioning from using paper forms filled out by hand to using electronic forms can be revolutionary for business.
Beyond this transition, however, lie many additional benefits that come from integrating online forms with other business systems and processes. Moving away from paper-based forms is one of the most important first steps in implementing office automation.
When you invest in form software, don’t just think about the immediate benefits of doing away with paper and its limitations. Think ahead to ways in which online forms can integrate with other office processes. If you select the right form software, this is easy to do.
The Scourge of Duplication of Effort
If you’re old enough to remember a time without office networks, you’re undoubtedly familiar with duplication (or triplication) of effort. Someone completes a paper form by hand. Then someone else types that information into another form or enters it into a spreadsheet or database.
Or, you start a new job and your first day is spent filling out forms by hand, most of which require variations on the same information, like your name, address, and social security number. Then someone else is responsible for ensuring that the data you wrote down is accurately entered into the forms used by the business and by the government. It’s easy to see how much room for error there is when effort is duplicated. Online forms can do away with a significant amount of duplication of effort.
Integrating Online Forms with Spreadsheets
Online forms that are easy to integrate with other office systems save time and reduce the number of points where errors can creep in. When someone completes an online form that is handled with powerful form software, the data entered can then be automatically used in many different ways. It can be used to auto-populate similar fields in other forms. Or it can be fed directly into spreadsheets for processing there, without someone having to re-enter the data by hand. Everything is faster, and human error has a much smaller window of entry into the process.
Integrating Online Forms with Customer Relationship Management
Online forms that integrate with customer relationship management (CRM) systems like Salesforce can save time and effort across multiple departments. Suppose someone fills in a brief form on your company’s landing page. That information can not only be sent to the person who is best-equipped to act on it, it can also be sent directly into Salesforce, helping build up your lead lists. Depending on how you have permissions set up, the information can then be made available to any number of people, who can retrieve it and act on it as necessary, without the potential customer having to do anything else.
Integrating Online Forms with Other Systems
When you can integrate online form information with important assets like databases, you not only save money and time, you build up a valuable collection of data from which you can gain key insights. Information from product order forms, for example, could be sent to a database automatically. Later on, you could retrieve that data to find out about sales trends over time, how sales are doing in various geographic regions, and which customers are your highest-value ones. The insights you gain can be used for more accurate forecasting and better customer response times.
PerfectApps is form software that lets you do away with paper forms, but it also empowers you to do much more. PerfectApps integrates with both Google Sheets and Salesforce, and it can be made to integrate with your other systems without having to program. In other words, it is a powerful tool against duplication of effort, streamlining your operations and cutting error rates.
If it’s time for your business to cut out slow, manual processes, integrate systems, and reduce errors, you should learn more about PerfectApps. We encourage you to watch the demo video and maybe browse through some of our case studies. See for yourself how PerfectApps reduces duplication of effort and accelerates processes, saving time and money and freeing you up to pursue your most important business goals.
