Hosts Brian and Kim discuss better business integration software. Many companies have spent years and countless dollars (for hardware, software, development, and consulting services) developing solutions that solve individual business problems. It’s not uncommon to find many different applications running within a small office.
Video Transcript
Welcome to My Office Today, I’m Brian and I’m Kim. Today we’ll be discussing integrated technologies. Many companies have spent years and countless dollars (for hardware, software, development, and consulting services) developing solutions that solve individual business problems. It’s not uncommon to find many different applications running within a small office. In most cases, those applications continue to be vital to the operation of your business. The problem with multiple applications is the pure redundancy of data in each program. It then becomes an even larger task to manually duplicate and update information in each of these programs. These valuable applications, therefore, have limited interoperability and inter-application communications capabilities. This makes it difficult to leverage them to add new business value, such as offering new revenue opportunities, or reducing costs. This process wastes countless hours on data entry instead of billing time.
Sometimes there is absolutely no way to consolidate programs into one single program, because of industry specific applications. We often hear about companies carrying out procedures in an archaic fashion because “that’s how our computer systems work.” But there are options available to synchronize data between these applications. Practice Management Software acts as the central hub of all information, and the robust integration tools enable your office to painlessly share contact information between other programs. Allowing for endless integrations, this software eliminates duplicate entry points and makes the task of data duplication more seamless. Some of the benefits to an integrated solution include reduced cost of manual data reentry and report generation, more efficiency with your staff, eliminating the cost of storing and managing redundant data, boosting customer retention, lowering ongoing system administration expenses, and simplifying business processes via workflow.
Practice Management 2011 has several standard integrations that help you, like printing address labels from your Dymo Label printer, getting directions to a client’s location, or finding out more information about the client from various social networks. Many popular tax programs also integrate your data from your tax software and sync it with your existing contacts. Any changes to a contacts’ information can be sent from Practice Management to your tax software. You can also transfer spouse, dependents, partners and other related records. If you have other software applications that can import data, you can export information to a Microsoft Excel file and import or export without much effort. Simply match up each cell with the fields on the contacts tab and import the contact’s name, address, phone number and more. In addition, Laser App, a widely accepted forms tool for Financial Planners, is integrated as well. Laser App provides over 10,000 fund forms in fillable PDF format. Just simply press a button and populate all forms with the selected client’s information.
Utilize all of the workflow benefits, including billing and tracking A/R, in Practice Management, taking advantage of incredible reporting and metrics. Then export invoices and payments to Quickbooks. Integrate Microsoft Outlook calendars, contacts and tasks from Practice Management 2011 schedules, contacts and tasks. Sync all information in real-time. Then bring in Outlook email for review, reading and storing those messages in the document management system. Another powerful integration to consider / is a client portal. A good client portal will not need any extra software installed, only an internet browser. There’s no longer a need to email “Confidential Information” through the internet. The full power of portals are found in document transfer, email campaigns, project status, messaging and invoice payment.
Join us next time where we’ll discuss moving your email to Google. For more information about Practice Management, head to their website at officetoolspro.com. I’m Kim and I’m Brian, thanks for watching My Office Today.
