For every company, big or small, it can be challenging to handle all the aspects of a business such as sales, operations, finance, human resources, payroll, etc. To be candid, you require more than just management skills. At some point in time every business must consider switching to business management software if they wish to run their activities optimally.
What's fascinating is that there’s dedicated applications available for the different department processes of an organization. One must not compromise on picking software that has a limited role in their specific business model. With that said, it’s also imperative to choose software that can add value to your existing operations.
Top features to look for in business management software
Choosing the right software can become a stepping-stone for your company’s ladder of success. Ensure the business management software that you choose has these key features that can improve productivity, efficiency, and automate workflows:
Task management
This is an important feature as tasks are what drive the project’s objectives. The software you choose should have ability to assign tasks and provide visibility regarding the status of tasks across projects.
Gantt chart
This is a critical feature and helps you in planning, scheduling, and viewing tasks over time. Gantt charts are a critical feature of project management.
Read on: What is a Gantt chart and how does it help?
Asset management
Managing organization inventory is essential. Ensure your software can track the location of your organization’s assets so that you have better control.
Reports & dashboards
Accurate and real-time reporting is crucial as it can help you make informed data-driven decisions.
Read on: Vault's Ultimate Guide: Tracking KPIs for project management
Business process designer
Customization of business processes is the key to improving efficiency and productivity of processes. Be sure to choose a solution that has a business process designer.
Personnel and HR module
Having a central data repository on your staff reduces your administration cost and efforts while measuring personnel costs and their performance.
Time tracking
Time and billable hours are important revenue sources in IT and other industries. Ensure you capture how long a task takes so that you can compare planned time vs actual time. Billing also becomes simpler due to accurate time reports.
Read on: How time tracking helps your business
Leave management
By tracking time off’s, you’ll be better equipped to align your resources. Increase efficiency by approving and managing absences so that you have a clearer understanding of the situation.
Read on: Manage and track time offs easily
Candidate management
A recruitment module is a useful feature that can help you advertise job openings. It can also help speed up the recruitment process and reduce the administrative costs that come from recruitment.
Integration with existing business operations
Most companies already have existing applications that take care of their operations. Either it's accounting, inventory control, or operations, and there could be several different applications running to support each of these processes.
Integration helps information flow across the organization's systems. Business management software helps company leaders and managers see a unified view across the organization. They can gain actionable insights and drill-down reports all in real-time. Unified data views help make faster and more accurate business decisions.
A good business management software must be capable of integrating existing operational management tools into a single platform. If there’s a lack of integration, then the information will remain in silos.
User-friendly interface
In every company there are employees that have different capabilities in terms of technical expertise and learning. Adoption of management tools is crucial for every department within the business. From HR to the technical experts, everyone will use the business management application.
Hence why these tools must be intuitive and straightforward to use. The user interface must be consistent so that the look-and-feel is uniform across modules. This will allow staff across departments to easily find information and use its features. A consistent and customizable graphical user interface allows for easy adaptation of the business software within your organization.
Accessibility and responsiveness
Nowadays, working isn’t limited to office locations. Teams can complete tasks on time remotely while traveling or from other places. Hence why business management applications must be responsive to access data from different devices like smartphones, tablets, and laptops.
Protection of data
Data management solutions must ensure the security of information. Data is a goldmine today, and the business application must be able to securely handle data.
The benefits of project management software
Project management software is a part of business management software applications. Project management software provides numerous benefits to companies. These include:
Managing teams effectively
Project management software allows users to plan projects in detail. From task allocation to team collaboration to in-depth reporting, it’s possible to set up schedules and assign tasks to resources quickly. You can also assess the progress of your projects in real-time and take action if necessary. You can also optimize resource allocation.
Measure progress and stay on track
Project management software helps monitor projects, track their status, keep it under budget, highlight risks, and gain resource insights. You can gain insight into the profitability of your projects and view important KPIs on dashboards that provide actionable insights.
Better planning
Project management software helps set up schedules and view Gannt charts on schedules and project dependencies. Improve project profitability and productivity with automation in project management.
Real-time dashboards
Using real-time dashboards allows you to track the progress of projects across departments. Analytics dashboards display KPIs in real-time along with insights which enables faster and more accurate decision making.
The features that business management software can offer have benefits that’ll allow you to achieve higher levels of efficiency and productivity within your business. Be sure to contact us and find out more about Vault and how it can support your business and its processes.
