How does collaborating with SaaS (Software as a Service) products help your business grow feature image

If you are a small or medium business, you probably have researched software that could help you with your accounting, customer management, or productivity. Collaboration solutions using multiple software helps small businesses manage different aspects of their business effectively.

Another form of collaboration is integration. It is defined as working or connecting with someone or something to produce something compelling. The article will explain significant reasons why and how integrating multiple software into your business is an efficient choice.

Solutions for Various Types of Collaboration

When discussing integrations and collaboration solutions, the primary entities that come through our minds are SAP and ORACLE. They are popular, effective, but expensive resorts for smaller and medium businesses. It is effective because it serves as a one-stop shop for all activities within an organization. SAP/ORACLE have modules within itself that satisfy the needs of these six central units of any organization.

  1. Finance: payroll adherence and handling invoice sending
  2. Collaboration and communication
  3. Customer relationship management
  4. Human resource management
  5. Marketing
  6. Business process management
  7. Operations management  

With the advent of SaaS (Software as a Service), individual software companies have developed individual products that serve these six organization units. However, these cost-effective solutions by their very nature have to work in silos.

Finance

Software like Intuit QuickBooks online integration helps manage the company’s accounts and send invoices and estimates to customers. It keeps the financial records updated and ready for access at all times. Since QuickBooks is a cloud-based product, it can be accessed from any location, making it convenient to maintain fluid and efficient bookkeeping.

Collaboration and communication

SaaS solutions like zipBoard are an apt example of collaboration tools. This product not only helps you get all your collaborative tasks in one place but also assists you in your creative reviews. Most distributed teams whether they’re completely remote or hybrid, benefit from contextual feedback in this asynchronous collaboration tool.

contextual feedback in zipBoard's pdf annotation tools
Contextual feedback on zipBoard

Customer relationship management

Zoho is a popular Customer relationship management software that helps through the customer acquisition process. It provides robust solutions to provide excellent customer service and market presence through its 24/7 helpdesk, analytics, and support modules.

Human resource management

KEKA has been a popular Human Resource management software that helps hire, manage, and monitor employees. As an employee-centric software, it also includes performance management, time tracking, payroll, and other features.

Marketing

HootSuite is a marketing software that helps with dashboard features that help you track the progress of your campaign, content, and marketing strategies across different platforms. This helps analyze the effectiveness of the marketing projects and make better innovative decisions in the future.

Business process management

Profio.co is a software platform that uses OKR(Objectives and Key Results) to help businesses track their performances. It provides OKR dashboards, department heatmaps, colour coding features, and other customizable options to understand better and analyze business performance.

Work Order Management

Field Promax is a field service management software that helps streamline work orders, schedule and dispatch them and track them until complete. Its mobile app helps technicians connect to the office in real-time, access data from the cloud, create invoices, and efficiently manage their work orders.

There are specialized order management software solutions for various industries. For example, in the brewery industry, there are brewery invoice platform software solutions.

Lack of Connectivity in Software Solutions

Each of the above-mentioned verticals solves particular needs and provides appropriate solutions for running small to medium-size businesses. However, efficiencies are lost because these disparate solutions do not communicate with each other to provide a cohesive and comprehensive solution. (For example, a customer list or a materials list is required in a Financial, Work Order Management and Customer resource management software). This lack of connectivity across disparate solutions may need yet another solution of its own. This is why businesses collaborate with multiple software.

Collaboration/integration between different software products can help businesses reduce redundancy, increase accuracy and streamline processes. It creates the platform necessary for growth and profitability.

Native and API Based Connected Software

There are many ways individual software companies have come to address this issue of interconnectivity.  QuickBooks, for example, has created an echo system (Intuit App Center) whereby 100’s other software can integrate with them (like Field Promax for Work Order management) to make the business process seamless. The collaboration between the two software allows a two-way sync of customer data and invoice transactions.

Many software exposes their APIs so that other software can integrate with them. For eg: zipBoard helps you connect your native tools to its product through its APIs. Such interconnectivity creates tremendous value for the end customer. It contributes to the robust growth of the organization with data consistency and increased productivity. It enhances the potential of the organization to think better, act differently and reach its goals in due time. 

Zapier is yet another solution that provides an easy-to-use platform to connect different software with ease and without code. For example, a business may have a legacy customer database that can be enhanced by integrating it with Mailchimp. It helps with shifting data and information between the connected apps or software automatically, saving you time and effort.

Choosing the Right Collaboration Solution for Your Team

With adequate and necessary collaborations and integrations between software, organizations attain value and high standards. This eliminates double entry of data while helping create a shared repository that all other entities can leverage to bring value to an individual or organization. Collaborating with multiple software is more cost-effective and equally powerful as popular software like ORACLE and SAP for small businesses.

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Author Bio:

joy gomez author headshot

Code is the central element that governs Joy Gomez’s universe; how he thinks, and how he lives. He is a self-taught, process-driven programmer and a first-generation immigrant from Southern India. He has completed engineering school while working full time with generous support and scholarships from employers due to his high productivity and drive. He is and has a Black belt in Lean Six Sigma. He has created Field Promax to pursue his natural-born expertise – code, streamline processes, and code more.

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