Bizinta News & Trends
What’s five minutes? You may think, not much, but if you are running a small to medium sized business – five minutes can directly cut into your bottom line. In a typical 8 hour work day, every 5 minutes makes up approximately 1.5% of that day. Which begs the question, how many 5 minute increments does your employee base spend doing tasks that could be automated and/or streamlined? If you have a staff of 25 people who on average get paid $35/hr, every day that 5 minutes is wasted collectively, adds up to ~$25,000 in lost productivity per year. That dollar figure only gets bigger and bigger as more 5 minute increments add up and/or your staff size grows.
Most business owners have a sense that they probably could be doing more to increase productivity by automating processes, but have no real data on where to start.
Step 1: Track your staff’s time spent on tasks and projects. Yes, I hear you grumbling. The thought of making your staff submit time sheets will not win you a popularity contest. Although, if you have the right software, then filling out a time sheet takes less than 5 minutes.
Step 2: Make sure you are tracking the right categories of time. If all your employees are doing is putting 8’s across the board, so you can submit to payroll, then you're spending the time and money to do time sheets, but you're not getting any actionable data from the process.
Step 3: Take a deep dive into your time data and see how long tasks and projects are actually taking versus what you think they should take. This type of analysis will let you pinpoint your problem areas and introduce new processes.
Let’s flash forward, to an actual case study of where Company A’s invoicing process was taking way too long. It was currently taking a week to send out client invoices, which was affecting cash flow. After analyzing the timesheet data, it was determined that each invoice was taking, on average, 15 minutes to create, approve, and send. There was a lot of manual entry and customization needed for each invoice. They were averaging 200 invoices a month and at 15 minutes apiece, that made the billing process take about 50 hours end to end.
Realizing they needed to automate, they implemented Bizinta’s billing solution which reduced the time it took to process invoices down to 6 minutes per invoice or 20 hours for the billing cycle saving them 30 hours every month! Over a year, this adds up to an hours savings of nearly a quarter of a FTE or in our example at a $35/hr average pay rate - over $10,000 a year for this one process. That savings pays for the Bizinta billing module 3x over.
End result, the time saved during invoice generation allowed the staff more time to analyze invoicing reports and figure out what new services they could up-sell to their client base.
In a time where everyone is asked to do more with less, this type of productivity increase is instrumental in running a successful business. So ask yourself, could your business use a productivity boost? If yes, let’s set up a call to analyze your business.
