Investor Marcus Lemonis of the hit TV series The Profit emphasizes that what he evaluates to determine if a business can be successful is the people, product and processes. He mentions using the same online workflow system to manage the processes in all of the businesses he invests in.
Processes are essential to staying on top of both workload and finance. The right process can even ensure that you maintain your profit margins. Every business must develop whatever processes they require to become successful and stay that way.
It is essential to perfect your processes before a business gets successful and starts scaling larger. Growth before having the ability to manage it is a frequent cause of customer and client dissatisfaction leading to business failure.
Online Workflow for Business Processes
Fortunately, many applications have been developed to make creating business processes simpler. Over 50 invoicing solutions exist; some create quotes and track payments – but most do not do a great job of managing the entire workflow.
Almost none of the typical invoicing solutions is capable of calculating profits. While solutions often do offer integration, why use multiple systems if you can enter the data once and have one system that can handle your entire business process?
Rather than using separate systems and processes, or integrating multiple solutions into each other, an online workflow system like WorkflowMax can integrate all the processes in a business into one solution.
Why WorkflowMax Online Workflow System?
Most solutions we use to manage projects do not give us the information we need to know whether individual products or jobs are profitable. What we need is a real-time, cloud-based integrated workflow system / job management software.
Some of the benefits of having one workflow system to manage every aspect of a business are:
- enter data only once
- end-to-end job management: assign jobs, create deadlines, track timelines, set notifications for missed deadlines
- manage leads
- generate instant quotes; when clients click accept a job is created instantly
- time-tracking
- job management (assign jobs, track timelines, notifications of missed deadlines)
- instant invoicing (hourly or flat rate)
- generate purchase orders
- manage documents
- reporting: net profitability by job; identify most profitable clients; determine where staff spends the most time; customized reports for clients
- stay on top of outstanding invoices; improve cashflow
WorkflowMax incorporates all the processes to manage an entire business and integrates with Xero cloud accounting software. All the data is real time and because it is in the cloud it can be accessed from any device anywhere.
This video shows some of the features including how to determine the profitability of a specific job and covers the Top 6 Reasons Service Businesses Choose WorkflowMax:
Video Highlights:
- Leads, quotes, time-tracking,
- Enter data once and it follows from beginning to end
- Give more accurate quotes
- Get actionable insights on your business
- Check job profitability
- See outstanding invoices
Types of Businesses Using WorkflowMax
This particular online workflow solution is targeted at service businesses. Starting at just $15/mo for one user, any small business can afford to use WorkflowMax. You can find case studies on their site for these types of businesses:
- Business Consultants
- Creative/Marketing Agencies
- IT & Web Services
- Architects
- Building & Construction
- Engineers
Design an Online Workflow System
While Chris Brogan did share an online workflow system he designed using many individual tools, they aren’t all free and I really can’t recommend reinventing the wheel.
There may have been a time when we needed to cobble together many solutions, but now that there are comprehensive online workflow systems, why choose to do this the hard way?
What separates successful freelancers and businesses from those who are struggling is the effectiveness of the processes they use. WorkflowMax when integrated with the Xero accounting system provides an end-to-end business management system.
