Cashflow is king when it comes to running a business. Visibility and control over your incomings and expenses is essential to running a tight, profitable, ship. However, with the rapidly changing disability service provider landscape, it is essential to reinvest some profit back into marketing activities that will help attract new clients.
The old adage, “you have to spend money to make money”, rings true, however sometimes it can be difficult to see where you can find the money to invest in proactive marketing activities.
Some areas where it is possible to free up some cash while not compromising service delivery are:
Expenses Claim Processing
Often, businesses that rely on manual expense claim processes find themselves paying out higher than what they should be on expenses claims. Take mileage for example. In auditing a medium-sized DSP with employees that claimed vehicle mileage through a manual system, we found they were overpaying expenses to the tune of 20%, totalling $32,000 per year! That’s a huge amount of cash to “lose” each year, and money that can be better invested into income-producing activities.
A simple recommendation of implementing GPS enabled data collection and tracking in company vehicles, linked to our CARETAG Transport Module enabled them to stop their overspend and reinvest that surplus cash into other areas, such as marketing.
Labour
Streamlining business administration processes can help free up cash by reducing the number of labour hours required to perform manual administration tasks. Investment in smart software systems can assist in reducing the need for manual entry and duplication of data recording, which results in a direct reduction of wasted time which costs you money. In the case of the medium-sized DSP we audited, we found that they were spending 6,966 hours on administration tasks each year, encompassing invoicing, roster generation, time-sheet recording, submission and payroll processing etc. By upgrading their existing software systems to an intelligent, modular system that seamlessly transfers data across departments of the business, and automatically reconciles timesheets, services delivered, and invoices generated, resulting in only needing to enter data once, the business could save up to 6,947 administration hours per year! In pure dollar terms, that meant the business could free up $380,000 in cash to divert to marketing and client service delivery areas of the business.
As DSP’s run to catch up with the rapid changes happening to the disability sector, we are confident that these examples are not unique. Opportunity exists to streamline your business, improve your processes and free up some cash to invest in raising awareness about your business to your target customers, and positioning your business in front of your competitors. An approach that will be essential to the long term sustainability of your business.
CARETAG is a purpose-built, easy to use, software management system designed to streamline your administration, saving you time and money. CARETAG was designed to address the challenges of service providers in the community care industry, specifically NDIS and MyAgedCare providers. Designed as a flexible, modular system, CARETAG can integrate with your existing system, or be installed as a completely new solution, tailored to your business’ requirements. If you’d like to learn more about our case study, please click here, or contact us on info@caretag.com.au for more information.
