There is a clear time strain on business owners with, 42% more hours at work and 40% less holidays compared to 5 years ago. As well as 72% working longer days and weekends. But what 3 signs show you that your business has outgrown your current processes?

1. Struggling to cope with the amount of business knocking on your door
   At best, leads are not being accurately logged and proactively followed up. At worst, new business is turned away simply because the amount of time it takes to process makes it unprofitable.
2. Manual processes are draining staff time and resources
   Asking staff to re-key in information opens you up to error prone and costly orders.
3. Ongoing headaches about reporting
   67% of data in SMEs is spread across many applications, making it a mammoth task to gain a good business overview.

As your business grows, so does every process – in volume and complexity. All of which cries out for more defined processes and systems that can work together to store business critical information.

As an SME you can begin refining your processes and systems as you grow by:

• Streamlining business processes and bringing customer and business information together in one place
• Integrating your front and back office systems to lessen admin and time consuming, error prone rekeying.
• Introducing systems (on or offline) that will enable you to edit, share, store and analyse business information across all departments, rather than employing a costly new member of the team.
• Even move online and let you customers place orders on account themselves.

A recent Forrester survey highlighted improving integration between applications as one of the top 4 business goals of IT departments. ProspectSoft CRM and eCommerce integrates with Access Dimensions, Exchequer, Pegasus Opera and Sage 50 accounting systems.