How Automated Is My Business, and how can FileMaker help?

March 13, 2021
William Miller
Automated Business

Everybody likes to think they have a streamlined business, but how do you really know? And if not, how can you improve it with FileMaker?

One of the great things about working with FileMaker Pro is seeing how quickly a business can move from disorganized to a fully automated business SYSTEM. And as I have said many times a SYSTEM will “Save You Stress, Time, Energy, and Money”.

But how do you know if your are automated or not?

Well here are a few questions to think about:

  • Yes, you use software in your business, which is great, but does that software communicate with each other? That is, do you have to copy and paste data from one program to another?
  • How many different pieces of software do you have to track, and log into, and transfer data between them?
  • Do you have data silos in your business? That is, do some employees have information on their computers, that the rest of the company needs? For example, does the sales staff have the contact information for some of your customers or clients?
  • How do you store the records of your various interactions with customers and clients? (Email, phone records, your good memory, documents (paper or digital?), etc. What is your central definitive source of communication records?

These are the sort of things that can hamper and slow down your internal business processes. One study showed that some employees spend a significant part of their work day just trying to locate documents they need; whether those are contracts, invoices, how to sheets, etc. They cannot remember whether it was stored in hard copy, PDF, Word, or which hard drive, or computer, or file cabinet. A centralized document management system would solve this problem.

Another good question to help you to determine what needs improvement, is ‘what do you do over and over again every day?’ In many cases, it is those sort of actions which can and should be automated, often with software.

What I love about FileMaker Pro is that it is the perfect digital hub to help a business develop a SYSTEM which will Save You Stress, Time, Energy, and Money. FileMaker can connect to all of the major software tools being used today like QuickBooks, Word, Excel, Outlook, the whole G-Suite, Twilio, and all kinds of web services. It can push and pull data from Amazon, WooCommerce, eBay, etc. It can import or export data in Excel. It can update Word document templates with contract or client specific data for creating proposals and other documents.

To quickly summarize the primary benefits of using FileMaker Pro application software to streamline your business, here are three:

  1. Automate Your Business
  2. Integrate Your Data
  3. Coordinate Your Employees

Please feel free to contact us about how you can automate and streamline your business practices using FileMaker Pro.