When you are starting a business, you are probably a lot more interested in getting on with winning your first clients and providing the best services or products you can than with things such as organisational processes. However, there can be far-reaching consequences when you don’t choose solutions that do everything you are likely to need for the mid-term when it comes to running your business.
Many start-ups begin life with so many important things like CRM, HR and even payroll on basic spreadsheets rather than with tools better suited to the needs of a company and here, we are going to look at why that can end up creating issues:
Rapid Growth Can Lead to Messy Processes.
You may well be able to get by without having proper IT solutions in place for admin when you first start out and only have yourself or a few staff. You can create business processes on the fly involving emails, spreadsheets, and shared files, and these will allow you to keep things running. However, if you have big ambitions for your start-up, you need to be prepared that growth may happen quickly and suddenly, and you need to have systems in place that will support this.
If you need to take on a lot of staff all at once and your HR usually consists of a few documents held in a folder somewhere, this is either going to make onboarding new people more of a pain than it needs to be, with extra unnecessary steps involved in everything you need to do, or is going to mean doing a lengthy overhaul of those early processes and implementing new ones.
Either way, you are wasting time that could have been saved if you had chosen a better toolset and thought about your business processes in the early days!
Industry Standard Tools Make Working with New People Easier.
As you move forward, you may hire people to take over aspects of your admin, finance, and HR, or choose to outsource some of this work to third-parties. If you are using systems and products that are widely used rather than your own files and spreadsheets, it is much easier, not only to find the people who have the skills you need, but also for them to be able to get straight to work without having to learn any idiosyncratic things you have been using as a smaller company. Something like the CoreHR payroll system, which is designed to make life easy for businesses. will be far simpler for new staff to work with, too.
Scalability.
Many tools these days can be used on a software as a service (SaaS) basis, and so this can mean they can scale completely with your business, keeping costs down when you have very few users and still having the functionality you may need later available, without you having to move to a new system.
As you can see, it is definitely worth putting some research into choosing the suites you will use for your business’ administration while you are still in the start-up phase.
