Top Five Ways for Businesses, SME’s and enterprises to get the sparkle back this Diwali

My father who owns a shop in a district in MP has stopped going for collections since the pandemic started. I asked him — so how do you ensure collection happens? He said — I have stopped doing business with people who are not keen to send money digitally!

What a transformation! I have been asking my father to stop going for collections for a long time, but he didn’t. But now, a psychological change happened. I observed two things here -

1. Humans with a need for survival adopted a digital transformation.
2. Businesses who are not keen to adopt “digital channels” are the most widely hit due to the pandemic.

Our post of today focuses on point 1 that is the need of the hour. How Businessmen, Enterprises, and SME’s can use digital channels to not only survive this pandemic but grow and lighten up their businesses this Diwali.

Get Your invoices Paid Digitally — Invoice Collection

While your Accounting software or ERP handled the sending of your branded invoice, the crucial factor is its payment. SME’s and businesses suffer mostly because of delayed payments and long payment cycles ranging from 7 days to even 120 days.

How about helping your payers to offer a quick payment link that can work with debit/credit or UPI? Or if a business is still seeking help from the collection agent, tracking his footprints in real-time to know the payment status.

This assists businesses in boosting working capital and getting a real-time view of payables and receivables.

How Digital Collection of Invoices help in boosting Working Capital?

1. Your business can save time, eliminate manual error and reduce cost with a digital invoice collection
2. With no paper consumption, you are reducing carbon footprints thereby saving environment
3. You have better control and insight into your payables and receivables.
4. You can get paid faster
5. With the digital collection, you can avoid any disputes or clash.

Send Invoices Digitally — Connected ERPs

A manufacturer may have a distributor and retailer under him insisting to use a specific ERP. The same distributor and retailer could also be associated with another brand that insists on the use of another ERP.

With multiple ERP’s floating around — how can a business know his liabilities and cashflow status? Hiring an accounting team, and wait for manual balancing of accounts could be one way. But adopting a “Digital ERP integration tool” could help in staying up-to-date with real-time status of cash flow and some tools, also allow you to see projected sales for a month to plan your strategy.

How ERP Integration help your businesses in taking it to next level?

With data flowing seamlessly, you have more data, which means more variables and real-time data. With uncertainty eliminated and data in real-time

1. You have improved the quality of data
2. More variables help you in making an informed decision
3. The manual error gets eliminated, with automation thereby reducing cost

Settle your accounts — Automated Reconciliation

As a bookkeeper or accounting team one of the daily tasks which you cannot avoid is reconciliation. And when data is scattered across different tools or still in files, it becomes overwhelming to match and balance the accounts.

Hence, adapting to an Automated Reconciliation tool could come in very handy to each of the accounting tasks.

How Automated Reconciliation help in expanding businesses?

A reconciliation tool would help you in

1. Offering visibility and transparency to your transactions and payments
2. Makes your accounts audit-ready
3. With tax and compliance rules pre-applied or configured in reconciliation tool, you can improve the quality of financial data and reduce errors

Communicate with Your team — Distribution Network

Clear Communication is the heart of any business. While speaking via phone and WhatsApp/SMS may help. How as a business owner you can be sure that sales, marketing, and extended team know and can refer anytime?

Hence, creating a distribution network with different teams at different levels digitally can certainly help your business.

Let’s pick an example, As a business owner, team under you run a franchise of your brand, with pandemic giving hard time, you want to roll out a discount. You can write a message and send it to your contact list.

On the other hand, if you have stuff that varies because of taxes or regional charges, as an owner you can put in those additional charges and the local vendor would not be able to override them.

How a Distribution Network helps businesses in building a brand?

An efficient digital distribution channel helps in reducing costs, building more transparency with real-time collaboration, wider customer reach, and faster growth, leading to turning your business into a brand.

Access your Stock “Digitally” — Inventory Management

While getting stocks loading and unloading via a robot and deliveries by drone is a possibility in coming years. You do not need to go physically to the godown to check the stock. As “stock” gets unloaded at your place, use Inventory management tools from your phone/laptop and keep adding items with the desired quantity checked-in.

As and when you sell those items, the stock dashboard would show the items in real-time. You can also set a reminder as a threshold when you need to restock things.

In fact, many tools now allow you to place order directly, once a particular item alert is triggered as “low in stock”, you can place a purchase order [PO] to your supplier.

All of these are without even putting effort into calling someone, checking with your team, or sending an agent.

How a Stock/Inventory Management would help Businesses in saving money?

1. If you are into selling stuff that comes with an expiry date, it helps you in not selling or accidentally customer picking an item whose expiry date has reached, helping you in avoiding spoilage
2. With Stocks accessible on digital platforms, you can categorize that is expired and may be launching a sale or rework on re-strategizing how to clear stock.

How a Stock/Inventory Management would help Businesses in improving cashflow?

Your inventory directly affects your sales and expenses. With stocks in your godown, you have already paid or obligated to pay, you can project how much revenue you can generate based on historical data or another strategy that you implement. So a better Inventory management tool is a must for efficient cash flow management.

All of these are tiny habits, that need to be inculcated in your work-life.

Let Diwali be a time for “new habits”, new beginnings, and new success stories.

Let’s begin yours. Get in touch with us, and we can help you with the smooth adoption of digital channels. Hylobiz one-stop solution for all your accountant, sales and business needs to reconcile, integrate ERP’s, send invoice digitally, track cash and cheque collection and create a distribution channel.

Originally published at https://hylo.biz.