The 5 best tools used for business process automation

Business process automations is extremely important for small businesses nowadays. It allows them to spend less time on menial tasks, and more time on developing their business. Business process automation can help to improve customer service, reduce human error, and increase efficiency. In this article, we will take a look at some of the most common automations that small businesses can benefit from.

Online appointment scheduling

If you own a small business that provides services, chances are you spend a lot of time coordinating appointments. This can be a real drag on your time, and can often be quite confusing. Luckily, there are online appointment scheduling tools that can help to automate this process.

This type of automation can help you to automatically send appointment reminders to your customers, as well as allow them to book their own appointments online. This can free up a lot of your time, and help to improve customer satisfaction.

Inventory management

Another common automation that small businesses can benefit from is inventory management. This type of automation can help you to keep track of your inventory, and ensure that you always have the right products in stock.

Inventory management can also help you to automatically reorder products when they run low, which can save you a lot of time and money.

Lead capture and follow up

If you’re looking to generate more leads for your small business, lead capture and follow up automations can be extremely helpful. These types of automations can help you to automatically capture leads from your website, and then follow up with them via email or text message.

Lead capture and follow up automations can help you to generate more leads, and convert more of them into paying customers.

Accounting and bookkeeping

Small businesses often spend a lot of time on accounting and bookkeeping tasks. This can be extremely time-consuming, and can often be quite confusing. Luckily, there are accounting and bookkeeping automations that can help to automate this process.

Accounting and bookkeeping automations can help you to automatically track your finances, and generate financial reports. This can save you a lot of time, and help you to make better financial decisions for your business.

Some of the most popular business automations software

Process Street

Process Street is a simple, free and powerful way to manage your team's recurring checklists and procedures. Process Street is suitable for any kind of company, whether you're running a marketing team or managing product approvals.

Process Street makes it easy to find and reuse previous checklist templates, so you can get your team's work done faster and easier. There's no need to reinvent the wheel every time you need to get work done.

Process Street is also flexible enough to adapt to your team's needs. You can easily add or remove steps from a checklist, or create new checklists from scratch.

A few tasks where Process Street excels are:

onboarding new team members
approving new products or features
managing marketing campaigns
conducting customer surveys

You can test Process Street by signing up for a free account. On their website

https://www.process.st/

Zapier

Zapier is an code free way to connect various online software. The visual intuitive way makes it easy to create an automation flow with triggers and actions.

One way to use Zapier is to create a zap that connects two software. For example, you could create a zap that connects Google Sheets and Gmail. Whenever a new row is added to a Google Sheet, an email is sent out automatically.

Another way to use Zapier is to connect to an API. For example, you could connect to the Stripe API and track all your payments.

A few use cases for Zapier:

Automatically sending emails
Automatically creating tasks or to-do items
Automatically adding new leads or contacts
Automatically posting to social media
Automatically syncing data between two software

All you need to test Zapier is a free account. Once you have a free account, you can start using Zapier to automate your workflows. Website: https://zapier.com/

IFTTT

One of the oldest solutions on the list is IFTTT. It stands for “If This, Then That,” and it’s a very convenient tool for automating almost anything. There are already a ton of recipes pre-made and truly any trigger you can imagine can be created.

I use IFTTT to connect to my Google Calendar and receive reminders of upcoming events via text message and, more recently, to get push notifications when items are delivered. It’s really as simple as that.

How to use IFTTT

Once you have an account set up, you can start looking for recipes or creating your own with pretty much any service you can think of. To do this, simply click the “My Recipes” tab, then “Create a recipe” from the resulting drop-down menu.

Now, choose your trigger. In the example below, I selected the “New Item Delivered” trigger from USPS.

Next, you’ll have to select your action. In this case, I wanted to receive a push notification through my smartphone, so I chose the “Notify me” option, then proceeded to input a title and message.

Once you decide on your trigger and action, you can go ahead and run the recipe or schedule it to run at a specific time if you want. You can also add it to your favorites from this screen by hitting the star icon in the upper-right corner.

IFTTT has a ton of potential and it’s really fun to play around with. It’s one of my favorite ways to automate tasks and it’s something I use very often. As always, if you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments below.

A few potential use cases for IFTTT are:

Text messages when an event happens on Google Calendar
Turn on a lamp when your phone enters your home
Send a text when you get a voicemail
Automatically back up new photos
A new blog post is published

IFTTT can connect to your Google Calendar, Amazon, Gmail, Twitter, Slack, Dropbox, Google Drive, Facebook, Nest, Android, iOS and a bunch of other services.

Check out IFTTT here: https://ifttt.com/

Make/ Integromat

Make ( formerly known as Integromat) is a outstanding example of visual no code automation software. To use Make / Integromat you build an automation flow by linking together Scheduled triggers and Modules.

Integromat allows you to access web services and many other software applications to build a chain of actions. See below for a list of some of the available Modules:

Google Tasks
Todoist
Telegram
Slack
IFTTT
Instagram
Dropbox
Google Calendar
Gmail
GitHub
Google Analytics
Twitter

A few use case where you would use Integromat are:

Automatically save a [Gmail attachment to Dropbox
Send a Telegram message based on a Google Calendar event
Post a Slack message based on an Instagram post
Send a Twitter direct message based on an IFTTT alert
Create a Todoist task based on a Google Calendar event
Create an Instagram post based on a Twitter tweet
Create a Google Calendar event based on a Todoist task

To learn more about Make/ Integromat, see About Make/Integromat

You can use Make / Integromat for free up to 1000 operations. After that you need to subscribe, starting at $9.99 / month.

Automate.

Our final mention on business process automation is Automate.

This is a powerful tool that can automate various business processes. It is designed to help businesses automate their processes and improve their efficiency. Automate can automate tasks such as accounting, invoicing, human resources, and customer relationship management. It can be also helpful with sales and marketing processes as well as project management tasks.

What distinguishes Automate from the rest of automation software is unique user interface. It allows businesses to model their processes in an easy and user-friendly way. Additionally, Automate provides a wide range of features and tools that can be customized according to business needs.

A few example use cases for Automate are:

Automating accounting processes such as invoicing and payroll
Automating customer relationship management processes such as customer support and sales
Automating human resources processes such as performance reviews and employee onboarding
Automating project management processes such as task management and resource allocation

You can test Automate on their website: https://automate.io/

Conclusion

Business process automations can be extremely helpful for small businesses. They can help to improve customer service, reduce human error, and increase efficiency. If you’re looking to automate your small business, there are a number of automations that you can benefit from.