We’re thrilled to announce an exciting development for Striven users: the integration of Stripe, a leading technology platform for online payment processing and financial solutions. This is not just a technical integration—it represents a significant leap forward in how businesses can manage their financial transactions in Striven with ease, security, and global reach.
Why Stripe?
Stripe stands at the forefront of the payment processing industry, renowned for its innovative technology that supports a myriad of payment methods. From credit and debit cards to mobile wallets and ‘buy now, pay’ later services, Stripe’s versatility is unmatched. It’s designed to fit the needs of businesses of all sizes, anywhere in the world, supporting over 135 currencies and available in more than 45 countries.
Like Striven, Stripe offers its users transparent and straightforward pricing models. Learn more about Stripe’s pricing model right here.
The Impact on Striven Users
For businesses leveraging Striven’s comprehensive business management platform, the integration with Stripe means a seamless, secure, and efficient payment processing experience for both you and your customers. Here are some of the key benefits:
Global Reach with Local Comfort: Accept payments in over 135 currencies, allowing you to expand your market reach without worrying about currency barriers.
Diverse Payment Options: Meet your customers wherever they are, offering the payment methods they prefer and trust, whether it be credit cards, debit cards, or mobile wallets.
Streamlined Accounting: Automatic recording and documentation of payments within Striven, simplifying your accounting processes and ensuring accuracy.
Transparent Pricing: Stripe offers straightforward and transparent pricing, ensuring businesses can plan and budget with confidence, without fear of hidden fees or complex pricing structures.
Looking Ahead
This integration underscores our commitment to providing tools that not only enhance the ease of financial management within Striven, but also empower businesses to grow and compete on a global scale. The collaboration between Striven and Stripe is a testament to our dedication to your business’s success, ensuring that managing your finances is as effortless as it is secure.
We’re excited for our users to experience the benefits of this integration, furthering our mission to support businesses in their growth and operational excellence. For more detailed information on how to leverage this integration to its full potential, we encourage you to visit Striven’s Stripe Integration Guide.
No business is alike. Products, customers, strategies, and everything in between all vary to certain extents depending on your industry-specific needs and business ethos.
What all businesses have in common, however, is the environment in which they operate. The world is becoming increasingly digital, synchronized, and competitive. Enlisting the right all-in-one business management software for your business will help you stay ahead of the curve.
Here are the most crucial and consequential ways that all-in-one business management software can provide a tangible benefit to your business operations.
1. Automated Workflows
The benefits of workflow automation are wide-reaching. Not only will the processes that you’re automating be improved, but your productivity in other areas will increase as well.
If you’re spending less time manually entering, checking, and duplicating data sets because your all-in-one business management software is capable of automating that process, you’ll be able to focus more on creative, high-level tasks that require more human attention.
2. Eliminate The Need For Internal IT Expertise
Safeguarding your business against technical malfunctions and cyber threats starts with investing in the proper technology.
No business is unique—true cybersecurity and individual business success can’t be achieved with a “one-size-fits-all” approach. This is why you’ll require software that can mold to the contour of your business’s specific needs.
All of your employees should be operating, communicating, and sharing documents under the same umbrella of security. With a dedicated software support team ready to work toward your business’s specific goals and needs, you’ll be prepared for any technical malaise that comes your way.
3. Save Money (Not Just On Software)
One of the biggest benefits of all-in-one business software is the cost savings. The software savings are apparent—paying a predetermined monthly rate for a single software solution allows you to spend less on various other disconnected software solutions.
Outside of the actual software savings, you’ll save money via increased financial visibility, smarter data insights, and more streamlined supply chain management.
4. Scalability
Growth arrives quickly—it pays to be prepared ahead of time. Though your business may not be bringing in billions of dollars annually, your all-in-one business management software can function the same as the solutions that those companies use.
Over time, your customers, inventory, employees, revenue, and almost all other facets of your business grow. Developing the right processes from the beginning will pay dividends down the line—playing operational catchup as growth continues upward will inhibit financial progress.
All-in-one business management software provides SMEs with top-notch, industrial-grade security features: data redundancy, dual-factor authentication, testing environments, and cryptographic privacy. Look for a software solution that provides a 99.99% uptime guarantee.
6. Better Document Management
For businesses of all sizes, keeping paper records means something is going to get misplaced. And loss is only the tip of the iceberg: a typical office worker uses 10,000 sheets of paper each year—it’s wasteful, time-consuming, and unnecessary.
Keep a centralized, unified document management system that can be accessed from anywhere. You’ll be able to find documents faster, secure them more easily, and generate custom reports about the data within your system. Not to mention, you’ll save plenty of money on ink and printer-related costs.
7. Smarter Business Decisions
The best business decisions are made from comprehensive, data-driven metrics. Gut instincts are valuable, but data-driven decisions reign supreme. By allowing technology to guide and assist you along your decision-making process, your business will reap tangible benefits.
You’ll be able to reduce spending costs, make faster decisions, and generate on-the-fly improvements based on real-time, accurate data. The best data comes in the form of custom dashboard reporting generated regarding up-to-date inventory levels, real-time customer/vendor transaction history, and the current job status of employees dispatched in the field.
Your employees are the lifeblood of your organization—it’s crucial to establish a pipeline of qualified talent no matter the industry you service. By incorporating this process into the software that handles the rest of your business’s processes, you’ll be able to make the most profitable hiring decisions.
Within your all-in-one business management software platform, you’ll be able to have a streamlined application tracking system by creating new job postings, adding interview notes, designing personality assessments, and storing all pertinent candidate documents.
9. Continuous and Custom Software Development
No business is unique—one of the most crucial tools that all-in-one business management software offers is the ability for businesses to tailor the software to their specific needs. Not only is it important for businesses to have customizable interfaces based on specific industry needs, but it’s also just as important to incorporate a software solution that allows for custom, personalized development.
The best software solutions have active development teams that are constantly improving their product. Customers should be able to influence and provide feedback as to what improvements in functionality need to occur. Software personalization is becoming more and more commonplace these days.
10. Build Better Relationships with Customers/Vendors
Getting the most out of customer (and vendor) relationships requires a comprehensive system that supports your sales team to make sure they never miss an opportunity, all while assessing productivity and profitability.
All-in-one business management software offers features that can boost the effectiveness of your sales team such as sales funnel and marketing automation, full spectrum sales pipeline visibility dashboards, and feedback-garnering tools such as surveys.
Wrapping Up
No matter the industry that your business operates in—manufacturing, field services, or any other—your business can advance from incorporating these 10 benefits of all-in-one business management software.
Every business has a different number of employees, different products, and different methods at which they go about the core principles of business. But for all of the differences that businesses share, they share much more in common.
In fact, most businesses share commonalities throughout their maturation process in terms of the warning signs that it might be time for them to adopt an all-in-one software solution.
All-in-one business management software is developed to make your business better, in whatever way that you see fit.
More often than not, the terms all-in-one business management software and ERP (enterprise resource planning) software are used interchangeably. On the surface, they’re very similar. Both are used to help businesses:
Increase workplace efficiency
Grow profit margins
Facilitate employee connectivity and collaboration
Enhance organizational transparency
However, all-in-one and ERP software are not the same thing—and the difference really matters.
Odds are, your business has considered adopting an ERP or an all-in-one business management software. From manufacturers to field service technicians to contractors, both types of software solutions allow businesses to accomplish more.
Industries change, but the questions that you and other business owners have about software solutions stay mostly the same.
“Will I be able to virtually connect with my employees, subcontractors, customers, and vendors?”
“Will I have a system of record with access to all of the data I need?“
“Will I be able to customize and automate workflows and other processes?”
“Will I have a clear and all-encompassing picture of my finances?”
Let’s explore the ways that both ERPs and all-in-one software can help you answer these questions, and where the differences can really impact your business.
All-In-One Business Management vs. ERP Software
Looking at the big picture of any business, the goals are almost always the same—increasing profit via increasing efficiency and reducing costs.
Choosing the right software solution will require a more granular approach to addressing what your goals are.
Is your business focusing on pushing a singular, uber-successful product or an abundance of moderately profitable items? Do you work with a large number of small vendors or a small number of large vendors? Does your business have multiple locations—or more importantly, is your business planning to expand?
You may not have all of these answers yet, and that’s ok. Choosing the right software solution isn’t about knowing everything, it’s about knowing what you don’t know and charting a course to seek out these answers accordingly.
Business Size
One of the most common misconceptions about ERPs is that they are only practical—or affordable—for large enterprises. While it’s true that ERPs were first developed for large-scale organizations, the operability, usability, and affordability of these systems have since trickled down into the small business world.
There exist ERPs that are best suited for large, multi-continental enterprises. You may not need a software service that can power 500 factories or handle 10,000 employees. What you do need, however, is the power and consistency that this type of software offers.
ERPs host and transmit all of a business’s data, but they often require additional modular integrations to reach their full potential. For a massive, Fortune 500 enterprise, adding additional software systems on top of an ERP isn’t necessarily a deal breaker.
For an SME, however, budgets are a bit tighter. It’s important to seek out a solution that provides the same level of quality data management as an ERP while taking the entirety of your business into consideration, not just a portion of it. After all, there’s more to your business than just silos of data.
All-in-one software solutions are tailored to both the fiscal and human needs of SMEs.
Customization Capabilities
Similar to most aspects of life, “fit” is one of the most important variables to consider—the software solution that is best suited for your business needs may not be the best solution for another business.
For example, let’s say your company is a mid-sized perishable foods packager and distributor. Some of your needs are no different than most other companies—you need to make smart hires, handle complex process scheduling, and reliably track financial records.
But when it comes to finding the right ERP or all-in-one solution, the most important variables are the ones that set your business apart.
When it comes to inventory management and transportation, you’ll need to allocate additional resources to account for the shelf life of your products. Are you able to easily create, scan, and implement barcode labels? When food packaging goes wrong, what additional health and safety protocols need to be enacted that wouldn’t be relevant to a traditional discrete manufacturer?
ERPs are often constrained to a particular niche. While a single ERP may be able to handle supply chain management or project management-related tasks, what happens when those functionalities need to be integrated with the other facets of your business? Is ERP software built for this kind of interconnectivity or will you be forced into adapting additional, time-consuming, and often expensive integrations?
All-in-one business management solutions, on the other hand, are more tractable. Offering the same transparency and data management capabilities as a larger ERP, they are equipped for customization that isn’t limited to a single business silo—they are backed by a team of professionals who see to it that their product fits all of your business’s specific needs, not just a select one or few.
Implementation
Getting your new software off the ground is always a multifaceted process. A big chunk that leads to successful implementation is simply choosing the right software solution, but an equally large portion falls in the hands of the rest of the people involved. Namely, three distinct parties are in play—your management team, your employees, and your software’s implementation team.
Migrating to any new system takes time. Moving the entirety of your business’s data can come with varying degrees of hiccups and speed bumps. Whether you choose an ERP or an all-in-one, the support team behind your new software will play a critical role in its successful adoption.
While implementing an ERP will often cover most of your traditional business processes, it’s possible that you’d need to integrate additional software modules. Common integrations would include online banking portals, e-commerce platforms, or something within Google Workspace.
In terms of the logistics and ramifications of integration, what is the main differentiating factor between all-in-one business management software and ERP software? All-in-one business management software solutions take the entirety of your company into consideration, not just the industry specialty that the ERP focuses on.
Because of this, all-in-one solutions are much easier to get off the ground. The need for secondary integration is minimal. For example, the need to externally integrate accounting software or document storage protocols will not be necessary—those features are routinely included in the best all-in-one business management software.
Day-To-Day Usage
Who will be using your software solution on a day-to-day basis? Will it be exclusively used by your C-Suite? Will your accountant be involved? Or is this software that everyone in your company can benefit from?
No matter your answers to these questions, it’s important to find a software provider that will be able to onboard all relevant employees to complete the tasks they need for their roles.
All-in-one business management systems are ideal for handling the human processes of your business—tracking productivity, handling HR-related issues, and managing customer relationships. Visibility and transparency are key. Most, if not all of your employees, will need access to these types of functions. But don’t worry, you can set permissions for various roles.
As far as ERPs are concerned, they’ll be able to handle most of the same processes. While all-in-one business management software is excellent at managing and automating human processes, ERPs handle large amounts of data. Think inventory management, data entry, and financial reporting.
Both ERPs and all-in-one solutions provide immense value for your business. Which begs the question: which type of software has more overall value? While an ERP might present value to a few specialized employees with crucial roles within your business (i.e., a plant manager or company executive) an all-in-one solution benefits every employee, regardless of job description.
Often, the best and most actionable data your business has to offer comes from the employees on the front lines. All employees work better with better tools at their disposal—not only will upgraded technology allow them to be more productive, but they’ll also feel more included in company operations and workplace culture. After all, your business functions best with happy people.
Finding The Best Software For Your Business
What does your business need to succeed? The answer is different for every ongoing concern. Maybe your claim-to-fame as a business is your product or service, but you need a better way to find new talent. Or, perhaps, you have all the talent in the world, but you need a better way to stay organized.
The true answer to “What is the difference between all-in-one business management and ERP software” isn’t just about the technology behind the software—it’s about what your business and your employees can do with it.
With an ERP, the solutions it offers are clear—a “manufacturing ERP” will tackle inventory needs, supply chain management, and handling custom building requirements. A “construction ERP” will handle meeting OSHA requirements, gathering project materials, and facilitating subcontractor management.
Those are great, necessary features that are a key component of success. But with an all-in-one business management solution, you’ll be able to utilize those features while connecting to the other various pillars that your business runs upon—accounting, HR, project management, remote work, and so much more.
In essence, think of an all-in-one business management solution as an “ERP+”.
Focus less on the final outcome, and start focusing more on the systems and solutions that will enable you to get there. Because the truth is that both all-in-one and ERP solutions can help your business reach its full potential, it’s a matter of how well they are connected and how well you utilize them.
Sales numbers and financial data: two great things that don’t always go great together. Both sets of information are essential to the success of any organization. That’s why most businesses purchase both accounting software and CRM software as separate solutions; they rarely integrate accounting and CRM software.
The problem? Those systems don’t always connect in the ways they should. And when they don’t, you risk a complete misunderstanding of your profit, efficiency, cost management, and much more.
For many growing businesses, accounting software solutions such as Quickbooks are the status quo. But with limited features when it comes to tracking, reporting, and transactions, many businesses find themselves looking for something more. This is where having the right ERP software can really make a difference.
Of all your organization’s data sets, matching sales with your accounting numbers is especially important because they are naturally prone to differences. If endless meetings and numbers comparisons sound neither thrilling nor possible, there’s a better way to do it.
The Importance of Integrating Accounting and CRM Software (With ERP Software)
Much like the cultural distinctions between sales and accounting departments, CRM and accounting software systems can be vastly different. Both are, at their core, databases. And though it should seem simple to transfer information from one database to another, it rarely is.
Putting aside the annoyance of constantly having to sign into other software applications and the potential for lost data, lacking accounting and CRM integration carries more dire implications.
Here are 6 opportunities, most of which are mission-critical, you might be missing without a properly integrated CRM and accounting software.
1) Recognizing Profit
Companies with unconnected software have a very difficult time seeing their profit. Consider this scenario: your sales team mistakenly interprets an influx of orders to mean profit. On the surface, it’s a logical interpretation. Customers are buying, and that must mean positive numbers for the organization.
But that’s not always the case. How can the sales team really know that the company is profitable?
In order to assess profitability, the sales team needs to be able to see expenses. It’s entirely possible that a recent influx of sales is the result of higher marketing spend. Without a centralized way of sharing data, there are too many potential blind spots among divisions.
Profitability issues work the other way, too. If the accounting department can’t see CRM data, they can’t know how many invoices should be generated from all of those new product orders the company received.
Your accounting and sales divisions will likely always see some measure of separation. But integrated software allows them to have conversations, when needed, based on shared internal data. That conversation is not just expedient. It’s also based on a singular understanding of what factors comprise profit and loss.
2) Process Efficiency
With separated accounting and CRM systems, many companies complain that their staff has to enter data multiple times just to make sure it’s present on all systems. That means at least doubling (but sometimes tripling) their efforts. It also means the organization increases its risk of input errors. The process of reviewing, finding, and fixing those data errors is time-consuming and chaotic.
By contrast, integrated solutions eliminate double-entry and limit the risk of errors. Of course, those errors may happen sometimes. But when they do, your staff will only have to correct them once. Not twice. Not four times.
This kind of inefficiency happens especially often to growing organizations. As their sales and financial data get more complex, processes become more difficult. It can be a gradual change, happening often without the company even noticing. That’s why integrated solutions allow companies to grow without sacrificing the integrity of their data.
3) Proper Cost Management
We live in the age of subscriptions. From television to food, we pay for more of what we use with recurring subscription charges. Software is no exception.
But with each new software solution your company subscribes to, you don’t just increase your recurring payables. You also increase training, maintenance, and efficiency costs. Those costs, of course, multiply with each new subscription.
It’s one thing to have software that helps you report on costs and expenses, but what about the costs and expenses for all those software solutions? Moving to a single, integrated solution will drastically cut your company’s subscription fees into one bill. Further, you’ll be able to leave behind the maintenance labor you once used on all of those systems to run reports, export data, etc.
4) Accuracy & Visibility
If your sales and accounting teams never interacted, how would orders move to invoices? How would you know when a customer needed a credit, or when to complete an order?
Of course, your teams docommunicate. Just not always electronically. With a single business management software, your sales orders can automatically generate invoices— with no manual entry whatsoever.
But the questions go deeper than credits and invoices. Throughout your organization’s lifecycle, you’ll ask plenty of them. Should we renovate the office? Can we hire a new employee? Does it make sense to purchase a new fleet vehicle? Your answers to these questions depend on your assurance that you have the funds and financial stability to act accordingly.
With a full business management solution, users can generate informative system reports can at any time. Imagine having the ability to view and compare data across divisions, without the struggle of using multiple spreadsheets and emails.
6) Audit Trail Accountability
Imagine having to track down which sales rep gets credit for an invoice because the sales orders are not connected within the same system.
Now picture how much communication time you’d lose outside of the system, trying to figure out which order matches the invoice, and then associating the sales rep to the invoice so that they get credit on the sale.
One last time: now think about being able to click two buttons inside of a single solution to see the same information. How much time would your organization save?
Conclusion: ERP Software Unifies Your Business
So far, I’ve said a lot about integrating accounting and CRM software. There are plenty of options out there, but the better ones won’t be separated. That goes for having two different products, but it also means not trying to connect modular solutions.
Even products that were developed by the same company may have vastly different development histories. One may have been acquired by the parent company, while the other may have been developed in-house.
Truly integrated solutions will be developed and supported by the same vendor, with the same standards and optimal connectivity. So make sure you do your research. If possible, involve your sales and accounting managers in your software search. The more you can collaborate, the better your chances of choosing the right product for you the first time around.
Your goal, no matter how you get there, should be a single version of the truth throughout your organization. That means the most accurate data, the most connectivity, and software that can handle it.
