Effective cost management is essential for a sustainable and profitable business. Inefficiencies in administration processes can cause business expenses to rise, which if uncontrolled, can be catastrophic for business’ survival.
Careful analysis of systems and processes within your business is essential to identify and reverse any inefficiencies that can cause cost blow-outs. Here are top 5 tips on things to look out for, to reduce your costs and improve productivity:
1. Automating Manual Administration Activities
Manual administration processes are the leading cause of wage blow-outs and unproductivity in workplaces. This can be from manually creating rosters, to manually reconciling supplier invoices. Identify repetitive manual administration tasks that can be automated to streamline data transfer and reduce double-entry requirements, allowing different departments to access the same information from the same source to complete their tasks.
2. Streamline Mileage Claims with GPS Tracking Devices
By installing GPS technology in your company vehicles, you reduce the need to rely on manual entry and record keeping by field staff and reduce double-handling time of manual reconciliation by administration staff. GPS technology in company vehicles automatically records mileage, times and routes travelled every time the vehicle is used. Combining this with management software applications such as CARETAG, you can automatically download the information to your accounts systems, ready for you to reconcile daily, weekly, monthly, or whenever your schedule dictates. Because it’s all tracked and automated in real-time, it is completely accurate, resulting in accurate payments made, and no profit leakage through overpayments.
3. Automate Roster and Service Schedule Creation
Manually managing the rostering of a medium to large organisation can be a nightmare for administration staff, often fraught with errors and double-handling of availability conflicts. Having to go back and manually find and fix errors results in a huge drop in productivity and a substantial increase in wage costs. By installing dedicated rostering software, you can reduce this administration time by allowing the software to produce rosters that reconcile with employees’ annual leave applications and client service schedules, ensuring that you have the right number of employees in the right places at the right times.
4. Automate your Service Delivery and Invoice Reconciliation
We’re coming back to administration tasks here, but inefficient admin practices really are the biggest productivity killer of businesses. For DSP’s, compliance with NDIA’s client-approved service delivery requirements has created a mountain of additional paperwork that just wasn’t there under the old block-funding arrangement. Installing software to streamline service delivery against invoice generation and reconciliation can, not only save manual administration time, but it can help reduce errors and improve NDIA payment approval, which is essential for effective cash flow management. CARETAG‘s modular system has been designed to not only transfer data seamlessly across modules, but it has been programmed with NDIA’s item codes for automatic invoice reconciliation and compliance.
5. Go Mobile
Implementing integrated mobile technology in the workplace can have many benefits in increasing productivity, as it allows accessibility and ease of communication when your staff are not in the same location. By enabling your employees to dial into meetings remotely, get quick answers by communicating via instant messenger, or enter their service delivery via a tablet in the field which immediately syncs with office administration desktops, you reduce the time and productivity previously lost through commuting, and manual entry of data.
CARETAG is a purpose-built software management system, focused on streamlining data and increasing productivity for National Disability Service Providers. For more information on how CARETAG can help improve the productivity of your DSP, click here.
