For most small & medium sized businesses, time is money.
No surprise there since many entrepreneurs / business owners are drawn to the challenge of trying to do a lot with very little…but how much does each click (or touch) cost them?
And when does extra work outweigh the advantages of using much of the software available to business owners?
Amy Tobin, who runs her own marketing company, Blue Sea Content, has been an entrepreneur for nearly 7 years. She’s careful about how she spends her time, particularly when it comes to using cost effective (or not so cost effective) software solutions.
“I know that I waste too much time focused on the little things;
I think most business owners do. Between sales, marketing, daily workflow, and accounting, I have to be vigilant with my time.
Sometimes it’s the small things that are the worst – like extra clicks to track what’s happening with a client, or having to re-enter details when all I want to do is send an invoice or check in with someone to see if they’re ready to work on a project.”
While two or three extra clicks required for an email to a customer via a software program can be annoying, business owners are usually willing anyway because it ties into the core reason they started a company: to solve problems for their customers.
That problem solving is why things like customer service, marketing, and product or service development typically rank higher on their to-do list than accounting or HR…
Infusionsoft 2015 Small Business Sales & Marketing Survey – http://www.infusionsoft.com/blog/how-do-entrepreneurs-spend-their-time-and-money
It’s the back end operations that they’re less excited about, and when they start counting clicks.
Josh Stover, CEO of 3D Printing Tech (who is also a user of OneUp), describes this as the challenge of focusing on his business, and not the systems that power it.
“My main goal is to streamline our operations so that we can handle retail sales as well as B2B style back-end sales such as purchase orders and invoicing.”
For most business owners, making core operations run smoothly & without costing a lot of time or energy is critical to business growth…and it’s also one of the things that drives what we do at OneUp.
Reducing clicks & touches (a big announcement)
There are roughly 500 million small business owners like Amy and Josh around the world.
Each is passionate about something different: coffee, books, model cars, marketing, woodworking, 3D printing, music, athletic training, physical therapy, yoga, wine… the list goes on.
At OneUp our goal is to provide simple, elegant accounting, inventory, invoicing, and more, on any device at any moment, so that you, the business owner, can focus on what you love (we know that for most people, it’s not learning new software=)
When we get an opportunity to adjust our design or code to save a click (or several) we make it happen. And in the last week we finished something we’re extremely proud of.
We’re excited to announce a couple of big changes:
Users of OneUp can now access a newly redesigned Chart of Accounts – makes it easy to instantly drill down and understand the current cash flow of your business.
What’s cashflow look like in Sales? Accounts Receivable? Easy to answer.
Updated to within 10 minutes whenever you sync, so you can see the current status of an account (other software programs can take up to 24 hrs)
Something we like to call a “one-click action” – easily convert a quote into an invoice, with one click or touch (if you’re on mobile or tablet). That way, all you have to do is keep a list of quotes for your customers and when they’re ready to buy one action sends them the invoice.
The good news is, more of these “one-click” or “one-touch” features are coming. Of course, it doesn’t matter what we call it, what matters is that it saves you time & energy to be used with your own customers!
Viva the Small Business [R]evolution!
This post is also available in: French