Managing Your Business Automated vs. Manual A Guide to Innovative Business Management By SMESoft Inc.

1. Let’s put in the missing piece to your success!
Managing Your Business
Automated vs. Manual
A Guide to Innovative Business Management
By SMESoft Inc.
Having a business is but a clear dream of many individuals, least to say that efforts
surmounts as they struggle on their employment to raise funds enough to start their own
business (not unless you inherited it). Putting up a business, in reality is not just a 1-2-3 step
process. From location hunting, to market analysis, to hiring staff, applying for permits, and
so on. Putting up a business is indeed a real challenging task. It takes time and a lot of
efforts, then you have started your business.
Then you have to build your market, it takes more than just simple efforts to build
your market. To note, the faster you build your market, the faster your business will grow.
But it’s not just creating your market, next is that you have to retain them. Keeping your
customers happy that they will want to stick doing business with you is yet another
challenge. Only after you succeeded retaining them is when you start expanding your
market and your business. But how will you do it if you don’t have the information you
need? Or not have even the time to look at your tons of paper records and doing
calculations like you do in your school days?
Managing a business is not just looking after the sales, agree? Real business
management requires you to understand, know and take care of your customers, keeping
your logistics up and running, monitoring your supplies and inventories, monitoring your
personnel, and practically following the movements of your cash – basically called
accounting. Keeping your payables up to date so you don’t worry about interests, your
receivables collected on time, monitoring your checks, income statement, balance sheet,
and the list can go on……….
A01091202 Managing Your Business: Manual or Automated SMESoft Inc.
Copyright © 2012 SMESoft Inc.. All rights reserved

2. Let’s put in the missing piece to your success!
How are you doing all these things???
There are always a better way on doing things they say. We agree, but when it comes to
business management. Does this apply?
Let us analyze the pros and cons of innovative business management.
Manual
Pros
 Personal touch – this is all the author can say, doing everything manually gives
personal gratification to a business owner that he is indeed “hands-on” to his
business and that he knows first-hand how his business is running.
 Can you think of anything else? 
Cons
 Tedious – take it or leave, doing everything stated earlier is a seriously tedious load.
 Takes a lot of time – a business is not an 8 hour job, especially doing things manually,
it seems to take forever.
 Highly-Repetitive – what you did yesterday are the same things you’ll do tomorrow
and the day after and the day after and the day after, true?
 Stressful – having everything going around in your mind while having customers
complain, while collectors knock, and suddenly supplies ran out or your logistics
malfunctions. How do you feel? Stressed!
 Disorganized – your thoughts will be shooting in many directions thinking of many
items in your business. Not to mention your personal or work items that may be
lingering in your mind.
 Lots of papers - papers here, papers there, papers everywhere.
 Archiving hassles – keeping all your records can be a challenge especially if you are
already running your business for quite a while.
 Retrieval hassles – same as keeping it, retrieval of your records to the specifics of
what you need would be some challenge
A01091202 Managing Your Business: Manual or Automated SMESoft Inc.
Copyright © 2012 SMESoft Inc.. All rights reserved

3. Let’s put in the missing piece to your success!
 Tedious historical data analysis – comparing and aggregating data from tons of
papers and other sources for you to look at your historical data? Think again.
 “you should be there” – manual processing for a “hands-on” person like you would
require you to be there, physically.
 Lots of learning – admit it, you cannot learn everything in weeks.
 Pilferage – manual processing leaves loop holes open for some unwanted activities
of scrupulous people.
Automated
Pros
 Automated – repeatable process can be automated, or better said, should be
automated. Technology innovations offer you better ways of executing your
repeatable process.
 Presentable – pre formatted reports and computer forms as oppose to hand or type-
written reports surely makes a difference.
 Easy recording – computer records all transactions with simple clicks and touch of
the keyboard
 Easy archiving – saving and keeping your data is even done automatically
 Easy retrieval – retrieval is as easy as saving your data
 Real-time data analytics – computations and aggregations are done by the computer
 Graphical dashboards – your data is presented with summary and in graphs and
charts that are easily understandable, these dashboards provide you of snapshot of
how your business is doing. As they say, picture paints a thousand words.
 Historical data – your data is kept in the computer, your historical data can easily be
accessed and used for trending analysis
 Paper-less – unless you are printing, your data is kept in soft copy that is accessible
anytime within the application
 Takes less time – while manual processing takes much time, automated processing
will take only a fraction of your time. Thus, you will have more time for other things
you’d enjoy or maybe other businesses.
A01091202 Managing Your Business: Manual or Automated SMESoft Inc.
Copyright © 2012 SMESoft Inc.. All rights reserved

4. Let’s put in the missing piece to your success!
 Business Intelligence – the consolidation and presentation of data, provides you of
real-time basis for your decision making. Data analytics and trending analysis gives
you a better hand in decision making.
 No Pilferage - when everything is recorded, unwanted activities may be limited at a
minimum.
 Off-site access* - need not be physically there if you want to check how your
business is doing. With some additional features at your option, your data can be
viewed even when you are away from your business.
* in some instances are not available
Cons
 Initial hardware cost – part of your investment would be a computer hardware set,
this machine will be your buddy and would do your work for you going forward. Of
course, cost will be worthwhile
 System cost – hardware alone is not as beneficial, software would be necessary to
execute automation. Cost ranges from slight to moderately acceptable.
 A little learning – just like new things or gadgets or cell phones perhaps, you’ll need
to play with it to understand before using it. But it won’t be long until you master it.
After reading this, feel free to ask yourself. Am I into this innovative business
management? Or will I stick to my beloved manual approach? The answer is easy, take the
leap and join many who understood and appreciated innovative business management.
Interested? Visit us at www.smesoft.com.ph and learn about innovative business
management for your business.
A01091202 Managing Your Business: Manual or Automated SMESoft Inc.
Copyright © 2012 SMESoft Inc.. All rights reserved