Kinspeed Sage - 7 tips to supercharge your business decisions

3 kinspeed.com 7 tips to supercharge your business decisions Running a business is a lot like running a marathon You know that planning for the future is important if you want to stay ahead of the competition and ensure the success of your business. But in practice, making predictions and acting on them is difficult when your company isn’t set up to regularly and accurately analyze your data. If you’re going to put data-based decisions at the core of your business model, you’ll need to be able to generate and analyze data quickly and accurately, whenever you need it— effortlessly. And, most importantly, you’ll need to ensure that data-based decision making becomes the norm at your business. Tip 1: Shift your focus from data entry to data analysis There’s one major factor that holds many small businesses back from making more data- based decisions: data. Ironic, isn’t it? You (obviously) need data to make data-based decisions, but the act of gathering the right data and entering it into Excel spreadsheets, forms, and your accounting software takes so long that you end up never getting around to the actual decision making stage. Data entry slowly begins to steal away large chunks of time, and you’re left with barely any time to actually analyze that data and make smarter decisions based on it. That’s why our first tip is surprisingly simple, but incredibly effective: automate as much of your data entry as possible. The right software can automatically pull figures from sales reports, invoices, and Excel spreadsheets through to your accounts, reducing hours of data entry time—and, conveniently, cutting down on human error in the process. It’s clear that cutting down on that admin time with automation can have a significant effect and really put you ahead of the competition.4 When you’re not spending so much time typing in figures, you’re free to spend more time thinking about how those figures should impact your business decisions. 71% of leading companies integrate analytics and business intelligence into their business management solutions. 3