After receiving five awards from Capterra in the first quarter of 2022, Striven recently received another recognition from the market research specialists at Capterra: the top placement on the Accounting Software Value Report.
Striven was ranked the highest in both “Value For Money” and “Functionality“. This data is directly sourced from Capterra user reviews.
Along the “value for money” axis, Striven ranks highest due to its competitive pricing plans and its ability to do more than traditional accounting software is capable of. Striven is an all-in-one business management software that handles CRM, project and task management, inventory management, productivity report generation, and much more.
As one reviewer says, “Our business has many variables and parts, and we were able to get Striven to do what other bigger systems were not able to….at a fraction of the price.”
Not only did Striven achieve high “value for money” ratings, but Striven has also garnered praise for its robust and user-friendly functionality. Having all of the important accounting features businesses need baked into a complete ERP system, Striven has been successful in helping businesses achieve their goals.
In the words of one Striven user, “Striven has gone far beyond our expectations. The functionality has already saved hours of time in our day to day operations.”
This report has been helpful for small and midsized business owners in showcasing the different products that are best suited for their needs.
Most notably, Striven places higher than other popular accounting software systems: Zoho Books, Odoo, and 3 products in the Quickbooks suite.
Click here to read the user reviews of Striven that this report was generated from.
“Do I have any of this product left in stock? Did the order arrive on time? What are our customers saying? How do I track down the one specific product I need amongst the rest of my products in my inventory?”
While many growing businesses find themselves seeking a simple solution to the questions above, what sets the average business apart from the exceptional one is choosing the right inventory tracking software solution for their business. Inventory tracking software is an all-encompassing system integral to ensuring that your customers receive the product they desire and that you, the business owner, can efficiently restock, distribute, and follow up as to the location your product has been received.
To assist in selling physical goods, some form of inventory tracking technology is used by most types of businesses including retailers, wholesalers, and manufacturers. This technology can range from free tools to expansive (and *expensive*) systems. While there are businesses already utilizing the best inventory tracking software for their business, many fail to recognize the importance of implementing this kind of solution.
Inventory Tracking in Optimizing Business Efficiency
Inventory tracking software allows you always to know which SKUs you currently possess, where they are physically, and what quantity is available at each location. According to Gene Tyndall, a well-known supply chain thought leader, “If a product is in your inventory, you should know where it is in your system—in China, on a ship, in a distribution center, or with a retailer waiting to be sold.”
An inventory tracking system allows for improved fulfillment accuracy, increased warehouse productivity, faster shopping and deliveries, more savings, and better customer satisfaction.
Inventory tracking helps to alleviate typical business woes of disorganized inventory, poor picking and packing processes, and lack of stock control. Additionally, inventory tracking software can help in detecting theft and administrative errors that would otherwise be difficult and time-consuming to deal with. Your warehouse inventory management software will help your employees always to be able to know the levels of all existing stock items and their specific locations.
Inventory Tracking Methods and Applications
Inventory management software covers the acquisition, tracking, and shipping of products, can serve as a forecasting tool for customer demand, and it’s able to offer alerts and notifications to improve operational processes such as cycle counts. It effectively organizes inventory to make the picking and packing process more efficient, automates the order-picking process, and also helps you to determine the operational performance for each item in your catalog while offering inventory reports.
Inventory tracking is useful not only to producers of physical commodities but to a wide variety of other industries as well. For example, a restaurant owner needs to be able to accurately track their store’s inventory to ensure that they are able to sell their customers the food they would like to order.
Inventory Tracking Software Helps Your Bottom Line
A solution for inventory tracking means your business reaps monetary benefits due to your operations being efficient and organized. Optimizing your warehouse or facility means you can accurately estimate the space you’ll need in the not-so-distant future. Additionally, labor costs are mitigated as staff becomes more efficient and able to help get your orders out in a more timely and accurate manner. It helps to save staff from going through the trouble of carrying out inventory recounts and prevents stockouts. Also, implementing an inventory tracking solution will make it easier to retain a large base of loyal customers, as your business will be able to happily boast about having both a great product and a great track record for customer service.
Takeaway
Inventory tracking software allows businesses to stay ahead of their competition and meet the increasing demands of their customer base. With the right system, a business can efficiently restock their supplies right when they are in need of them, ensure accurate and timely deliveries, and even protect themselves from theft and errors. All in all, inventory tracking software allows for time to be spent on other crucial aspects of your business as well as Helping you make better decisions for the company in the future.
To stay competitive, companies today have to adjust to today’s consumer expectations and embrace digital business management tools and all the accompanying advantages they provide. One of the best ways to accomplish this is by using effective business management software to provide quotes and proposals digitally via email or text. Some tech-savvy companies provide memorable customer proposals via interactive video proposal reviews.
In the 2020s digital decade, positive evolution in business operations technology has increased the necessity of updating business processes—or risk going the way of the dodo.
So, what exactly is “quoting software?” Quoting software works from a regularly updated, detailed transcript of the services that your business provides and clearly outlines your prices for various services and product configurations. The best quotation software systems guarantee that customers are receiving exactly what they are looking for, allowing businesses to build a reputation of trust and transparency with their customers. Over time, this leads to converting more sales leads and referrals, generating more business, and maximizing profits. Automating the proposal process is an essential part of helping a business grow.
Online Quoting Software: The Ins and Outs
Using online quoting software helps businesses be prepared for the demanding challenges that—if handled properly—allow them to maximize the profit of their services and enable them to grow faster.
Some of these challenges include not only accurately pricing your products and services at the outset of any engagement, but also managing dynamic price changes in the products and services themselves as market conditions change over time.
Tweaking these cost changes manually every time your salespeople prepare a quote or customer proposal is tedious and time-consuming at the expense of your business’s overall efficiency. Moreover, a manual process leads to errors, further reducing information accuracy and wasting sales time that should be spent developing new opportunities.
To reduce the risks of errors and increase operational productivity, the process by which your business provides quotations and proposals to your customers and prospects benefits from optimization. Quotation software centralizes the quotation process and automates it, safeguarding the data from potential human error to a much higher degree than by utilizing disconnected, manual processes.
Process automation simplifies everything—it saves time for sales staff who no longer have to manually research, copy, paste, then confirm price changes (with a manager?) before finally presenting the quote to the customer.
With employees having more time for other tasks, companies should be able to increase productivity by identifying additional manual business processes to automate—new projects or initiatives that, perhaps, had previously lacked sufficient manpower and focus to get underway.
Maximizing Profits For Small Businesses Using Quoting Software
Quoting software helps small businesses deepen customer relationships by responding quickly to their individual needs and demonstrating attention to detail. One of the main issues that arise for small businesses is when customers ask for minor changes, but the information they requested has already become outdated.
Information automatically generated by quoting software enables businesses to tailor the output of information always to match specific customer preferences. Manually, it is difficult to manage personalized configurations and custom quotes for each order. Quoting software manages and adjusts the price of an order, product, or service by using automated customizing tools.
As a result, quoting software for small businesses helps cultivate repeat and loyal customers and allows for-profit businesses to meet their end goal: maximizing profits.
In addition to developing relationships with customers, clients, and vendors, quoting software maximizes the efficiency and effectiveness of overall job performance.
Speed is an important factor to consider, especially for B2C service businesses that provide services to homeowners. Getting quotes to clients faster than competitors increases the likelihood of impressing prospective customers and closing business quickly. Since it can be difficult to manage lots of configurations, especially those centered around complex purchases, quoting software becomes indispensable, giving businesses complete control over the process.
Quotation software gives your business a strategic competitive advantage. The speed at which you’ll be able to get proposals into the hands of both new leads and existing customers translates into dollars.
Also, given that a price quote is one of the first things your customer sees, it’s important that proposals are presented to the customer in the most professionally appealing way possible. Quoting software comes preloaded with branded templates that improve the readability and design of quotes, making them more intuitive, and easier to say “Yes” to.
Choosing the Right Quotation Software
Quoting software, especially as part of an all-in-one business management ERP solution, is essential for any business that seeks long-term growth by streamlining its workflows, data management, and CRM capabilities. Since there are a multitude of different software solutions on the market, the question becomes which would best fit your business.
Some growing businesses find themselves asking the question, “Do we need job management software?” After all, job management software (aka project management software) involves practically every department of a business. From sales and scheduling to inventory and finance to purchasing and customer service, and on and on.
For historically blue-collar service trades such as plumbing, electrical, HVAC, house painting, pool & spa, glaziers, hearth & chimney, landscape management, solar, locksmithing, and roofing—really every business-to-consumer (B2C) company working primarily with homeowners—job management software helps a business keep track of every job, even jobs of enormous complexity that rely on dozens of highly-skilled craftspeople. The right job management software system is indispensable for field service businesses in every trades industry.
Job management software helps improve the overall business operations of a company and allows employees to complete a variety of tasks with better accuracy, efficiency, and accountability. From job assignment and scheduling to compiling and analyzing data, to managing budgets and orders, job management software allows businesses to work better. Without taking advantage of the benefits that this kind of software has to offer, growing businesses may see an impediment in their business’s long-term development. By utilizing job management software, a growing company can make the most efficient use of its resources.
Job Management Systems in Workflow Management
So, from a job software perspective: what is a job? Simply put, every job or project is made up of a collection of individual tasks that must be performed by a particular person at a certain time. A major benefit of job management software is the ability to effectively assign tasks while also keeping track of task completion and scheduling. The best job management software assists in matching the most suitable person to a task by matching the skills of employees with assignments that benefit the most from those skill sets.
According to Forbes, one of the top three reasons employees quit their jobs is because they didn’t feel valued by the company. But there is a solution to this dilemma—when you build job roles that clearly define responsibilities and focus on employee skills, they will feel valued.”
Additionally, job management software tracks work completion and manages employee and sub-contractor timesheets, and sends pertinent info and reminders through notifications, ensuring that tasks get done on time. Tasks are able to be easily completed with the ready made templates that a job management software system provides. With a coherent document-sharing interface built in, job management software is essential for any project.
Job Management and Data Integrity
Job management software is useful for not only analyzing individual employee performance, but it helps businesses better understand the overall data sets and analytics of a growing business. For a growing business, this is excellent news.
An estimated 80% of an analyst’s time is spent solely on discovering and preparing new data, which is an inefficient use of time.
Job management software keeps track of data and even utilizes past data to improve future projects, which will lead to reduced spending, faster decisions, and the ability to quickly adjust projects to new data.
When a business is hoping to expand, these efficiencies play an even bigger role. A growing business means more data to keep track of, and job management software is the ideal way to keep track of all of that data because it keeps the data centralized and easily accessible to everyone that needs it. A company doesn’t have to go through multiple software systems to get all of the data it needs, it can always access the most up-to-date data in real-time.
An added feature to data control that job management software helps accomplish is security and threat prevention, protecting your company by reducing the risk of cyber attacks, of which 43% happen to small businesses.
Job Management Software and Finance
Job management software also helps businesses from a financial perspective. Job management systems can calculate quotes and estimates, as well as track purchase orders, allocate costs, and keep bills up to date. Additionally, they can offer insight into overall productivity, equipment efficiency, and transportation costs. In essence, job management software takes care of budgeting for a company, so there is less to worry about between managing orders, overhead costs, unexpected payments, and any other budgeting concerns.
In addition to that, quality job management software lets you provide outstanding, five-star customer relations. By centralizing information, keeping in contact with customers, and receiving feedback from happy homeowners, job management software keeps customers in the loop and, through automatical email and texting, alerts them to any notification that they need to see. In both the short- and long-term, a single software platform that manages all of a business’s processes decreases the overall spending on technology. Since the right job management software oversees a variety of components of your business there is less need for multiple software applications to accomplish the same tasks.
Takeaway
The biggest advantage that job management software provides growing businesses is the ability to manage operations more efficiently and effectively. Job management systems allow companies to make better decisions about their overall business operations and do so in real-time, without the need for wading through separate software. Job management software is essential for any growing business, improving workflow, managing data, and keeping track of job costing, finances, or any number of things a business needs to track, either day-to-day or long-term.
