AUTOMATING YOUR BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION
IN TODAY’S digital age, advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing mean that a great variety of business tasks will be automated. This will not only save time but will ensure a high level of efficiency.
It is, however, important to remember that automation is not a replacement for human employees.
It is a means to make better use of time to maximise efficiency and free capacity for the tasks that can continue real driving business growth.
Here are five admin-intensive areas of your business that can be easily automated:
Keeping your inbox clean and organised can seem like a full-time job but it is a perfect example of a simple, yet necessary and time-consuming task that can be easily automated. Invest in software that separate emails you need to see from those you can review at leisure, reserving your inbox for priority tasks.
Gone are the days of timeintensive, error-prone and inefficient spreadsheets to manage a business’s payroll manually. Automated payroll systems serve to streamline and simplify the management of this vital business task.
Keeping track of receipts is an administrative nightmare that often gets left for month-end when memory fails and nothing makes sense any more. Using an automated receipt scanner dramatically reduces the time and effort the business puts in to tracking and organising expenses. The apps read your receipts and automatically extract and store key information, such as the date, merchant, amount spent and payment method.
Task and project management can be tricky and timeconsuming, especially when the team begins to grow and different people are running with different projects. Using project management tools will help in tracking all the tasks that a business has on the go and allow a business owner a great overview of progress. These tools can also be used to create boards, attach files and keep track of progress when it comes to pending projects.
The FAQ section of a website can only say so much and sometimes people just want to speak to someone, one-on-one. This is when integrating an automated chatbot into your business’s website or social platforms can be extremely helpful in fielding customer queries. This ensures that messages are responded to timeously as customer service has become much more fast-paced since the introduction of social media. These chatbots function within messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger and Wechat to offer customers full-time support.