Streamlining to Save Time and Money

Learning how to manage your database is the first step to streamlining your company and stop wasting time and money. There are a few tricks that can help small business owners improve their business and all they take is a little know-how and effort to set up. Gene Marks, a contributor to Forbes.com, suggests in his article “5 Easy Tech Tweaks That Will Significantly Improve Your Business” setting-up workflows, alerts, and triggers to help manage your business.

According to Marks, workflows are designed to make tasks faster and more automated. Try having a workflow to manage new leads by assigning them to the sales staff based on the criteria you outline such as region or interest. This will eliminate the need for a manager to have to the same or having fights over leads among your sales staff. Also, you could try setting up a workflow that will handle incoming inquires from your website that will forward the email to the right person in the right department while also sending a conformation email in the inquirer.

On the other hand, alerts and triggers can be set-up to send an email alert when something happened in your database that you would know about. The main difference between alerts and triggers is that triggers are program-based and often require SQL knowledge. Alerts and triggers can help make sure that nothing is overlooked by doing things like sending out emails to both customers and the sales team when invoices are over-due or alerting when your inventory gets low.

Once you have a command of how to use workflows, alerts and triggers, try coming up with ways to use them to eliminate time wasting activities and help make sure nothing fall through the cracks.

Although it might take some time, setting up alerts, workflows, and triggers can really help a small business owner not only stay in the loop, but also help the entire staff top of tasks and help with time-management by eliminating time wasting activities. If you do not know how to set these functions up, try taking a class, visiting support forums, or even hiring in an expert. But once these tools are in place, they ill surly improve your business.

Marks, Gene. “5 Easy Tech Tweaks That Will Significantly Improve Your Business”. forbes.com. 13 May. 2013.