A lot has been written about the wide and varied range of design software options that are available to designers these days, but what about the business side of things? What software suites can help with the day-to-day running of your design company? After all, we’d all like to spend more of our time designing rather than poring over spreadsheets and accounts, wouldn’t we?
Sales software
Obviously, every business, regardless of sector, needs customers. In an increasingly competitive market such as design, this can prove to be tricky at the best of times. Thankfully, there are ways that you can make things a whole lot easier.
Software that allows you to monitor leads and see easily what relationship stage you are at with them is vital to staying on top of your promotional drives. Sales management software is changing the way we interact with potential clients, offering them more value and creating a more personal way of working.
Project management software
If you are in charge of a team you are going to want to keep track of how things are progressing and keep your organisational levels up to scratch. Project management software allows you to keep everyone together, regardless of whereabouts in the world they may be.
Face-to-face meetings are no longer necessary, documents are more difficult to lose, and the excuses for not meeting deadlines become few and far between when you begin using PM programs in your business.
Human resources software
You may think that HR software is the sole preserve of giant corporations and that smaller companies would have little use for such a powerful tool. You may think that, but you’d be wrong.
Modern HR systems allow employees to take control of their own data, which for the smaller business owner often means a lot fewer tasks for them to deal with personally. Take, for example, an employee’s holiday leave.
The traditional way of booking leave would be for them to approach you, ask for a specified date, you would then check the date and either grant or block the request for leave on any given date. With HR software, all of the work is done for you as the automated system allows staff to book their own leave, without any input from you.
Add to that the reduction in mundane tasks such as form filling and keeping records and it becomes easy to see why so many businesses are embracing the HR software revolution.
Database software
For many designers, databases are essential. Efficient and effective storing of files allows us to draw inspiration without spending hours looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.
Database software is an extremely diverse sector, however. The many various types of database software available mean that a one size fits all solution is hard to come by, therefore a certain amount of digging needs to be done in order to find the right one for our own individual business. Nevertheless, once found, you will wonder just how you managed without it.
Getting to grips with the latest business software may seem like a time-consuming and somewhat tedious task, but the benefits of doing so will become clear over the longer-term. Greater productivity, more clients, fewer errors, and happier staff are all within reach if only we’d delegate to technology a little more readily.
