New year, new business practices.
At the start of every year, we get a chance to start fresh: whether it’s new years resolutions or finally taking a look at your accounts payable processes. As you reflect on your current practices, you might be wondering: what could my business accomplish if my team could free up time spent on busy work, and instead, focus more on value-add tasks?
Automation can help answer that question.
You’ve probably heard a lot of talk about automation and what it can do for your business. According to McKinsey and Co, 66% of businesses at least piloted the automation of business processes in one or more business functions in 2020.
While not all business tasks can (or in some cases, should) be automated, there are several ways that automation can help your team maximize efficiency and eliminate manual work, freeing up time for meaningful work that moves the needle for your business.
If you’re looking for ways to introduce automation to your business, we’ve compiled a list of tools that can help automate business processes, to help you kick off your automation research.
Ever thought about the number of emails you’ve sent back and forth checking on (or sharing) status updates on your projects? With Airtable, an all-in-one project management tool, you can check up on projects across your team, tear down silos and help streamline your project management processes.
Airtable can simplify your project management by automatically sending messages in Slack, creating or updating records, running scripts, sending emails, or even automating Salesforce or Outlook actions. And, their no-code apps let you create a single source of truth that’s tailored to your team’s specific needs.
Automation can’t create relationships among employees from scratch, but it can ease the process of introducing and facilitating relationships - especially for remote teams.
Did you know automated bill pay can save up to 70% of the time it takes to pay bills?* When it comes to automating bill pay, Corpay One can help - we automate payments from your business to your vendors, and can even schedule your payments ahead of time!
With seamless payment methods (including Check, ACH, Credit Card and international options), two-way sync with accounting platforms (like QuickBooks and Xero) and much more, your business can save time and streamline your accounts payable.
Social media plays a key role in establishing your brand and reaching your target customers, but maintaining a social presence can take time and careful planning. The good news is, Buffer can reduce manual work and make your social media manager’s life a little easier - whether they’re a team of 1 or a team of 10!
Buffer’s platform can help you plan and publish content across social media channels and manage your performance, strategy and audience engagement directly from their dashboard. They can also suggest hashtags, automate publishing and reporting and help create engaging content.
Properly supporting your customers is vital. While it’s important to provide a human touch to help address complex issues, Intercom can help you support customers at scale, guiding them to more efficient solutions.
Intercom’s functionality can automate support chats with customers by offering help center articles or answers to common questions - before a human gets involved. Together with your support infrastructure, Intercom can streamline support services and help your team get ahead.
You know you can use Corpay One for bill pay - but did you also know you can use our platform to automate spend control and approvals?
Ever wanted to connect two separate apps in your tech stack? Zapier can do that.
Zapier integrates with your app stack to build custom automation solutions. That means you can create custom workflows - so if an action happens in one app, it automatically triggers an action in another app.
For example, if you’re using Corpay One for bill pay, you could pull vendor data from Corpay One into your CRM tool. Or, use Zapier to set up an Excel or Google Sheets integration to auto-populate your Corpay One data into a spreadsheet - this is especially helpful if your business use accounting software that doesn’t integrate with Corpay One. The best part? You can do it all with no coding required!
There’s a lot to consider when choosing automation tools for your business. Before you decide to implement a new platform, make sure you consider your business’s needs, pain points and roadmap. To successfully implement a new tool, you should pinpoint where your processes are inefficient, and develop a plan to introduce new tools to address those areas.
With a bit of research and thoughtful implementation, automation can be a useful tool that empowers your team!
Ready to explore streamlining your spend with automation? Book a demo with Corpay One, and get started with better bill pay today!
About Corpay One
Corpay One is a leading spend management solution for scaling businesses. Get one, complete platform to manage your business bills and a credit card (the Corpay One Mastercard®!) to pay them. You can build custom bookkeeping and approval workflows that work for your team, while streamlining payments to your vendors, managing employee spend with custom controls and leveling up your business with line of credit. This is intelligent spend management designed to help you spend smarter, earn faster and save more. Book a demo to get started with Corpay One today.
*Source: B2B: How the next payment frontier will unleash small business. Goldman Sachs Equity Research, September 16, 2008.
**2.9% transaction fee applies.
