Looking to expand offices but don’t know where to begin?

As small business entrepreneurs expand their organizations and try to bridge the gap between small and medium business status, they can be overwhelmed by the administrative aspects. When establish itself, it is more of a necessity to win clients and outperform the competition than to become overly worried in regards to invoicing, and inventory control. After expanding, however, they soon learn that well organized administration is one of the key aspects to maximizing operations, as well as making their business franchisable or expandable.

With many emerging technologies on the rise, it is important to know what to look for in an internal control system. Despite the fact that most operations have many minor differences, almost all of them generally share some key aspects that one should look for in a software when beginning to expand:

  • The ability to share a common database between all locations that contains what goods and/or services you offer.
  • There should always be one central location where new items can be added, priced, and where descriptions are maintained. As items and services become obsolete, or new ones arrive, a business owner should not have to enter data into each location manually. This will cause errors across the board with naming conventions, as well as duplication at each location, which quickly becomes an administrative nightmare.
  • The ability to link a centralized database to an accounting system in the same location
  • This will vastly reduce the amount and cost of bookkeeping and accounting per location, as well as reconciliation at year end.
  • Option to force the push of information at any time
  • A shocking amount of software leaves the owner at their mercy. They are programmed to push to each day, with no way to force the transfer of new information. A shopper for these products often overlooks this question as it feels like it should be a standard feature.

In the end, most store owners are working people who excel at their trade but are unfamiliar with the territory of internal control. Not knowing where to begin is a large reason they cannot grow their business to the next level. With the foundation of features above, owners will, at the very least, have criteria to search for and questions to ask software vendors when shopping for a system that will not only help them expand, but will also reduce costs, wasted time, and, most importantly, offer peace of mind.