The following is a guest contribution from Mary Shulzhenko. Mary is a digital marketer, content strategist and a copywriter. She is passionate about writing on customer service, customer experience, small business, marketing and a variety of other business topics. She provides the original content for LiveAgent, an award-winning and the most reviewed help desk software for SMBs in 2018. You can find her on LinkedIn.

Would you agree to fly on a plane knowing that the crew was simply ‘told’ what to do but didn’t use clear guidelines and instructions? Probably not.

Sadly, that is how many organizations operate today – without realizing that it may result in a wide range of negative consequences, from employee inefficiency, to lost customers and profits.

Telling employees what to do is not nearly as effective as having a set of written step-by-step instructions they can follow, explaining how exactly routine operations should be performed. That’s where standard operating procedures, or SOPs, come in.

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Here at Process Street, we’re always talking about the importance of workflows.

Workflows help you define what work you do and the order in which you do it.

According to the Powering Productivity report from Planview, poor processes and workflows are the number 1 cause of inefficiencies in organizations. Plus, the Chaos Theory report from Projectplace revealed project managers lost 2 hours 45 minutes each week due to poor workflows.

When you document your workflows and improve them, you optimize your work. This results in better work done more quickly.

It’s one of the simplest ways to improve the performance of your own work, or that of an organization. From basic workflows with only a couple of steps to company wide workflows with multiple stakeholders and variables.

This principle remains true in countless use cases and industries but is most powerful in areas where work benefits from standardized practices.

This brings us to an area of business where standardization is a true sign of quality: accounting.

Effective accounting practices require a strong understanding of how information flows throughout your business.

In this article, we’re going to look at:

• What is the accounting cycle?
• What is a workflow?
• How to construct processes for your accounting activities
• 11 accounting processes you can try today

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We all want our audience to do something, be it to sign up for a new product or download an ebook.

This is why landing page best practices exist – to boost conversions.

That’s why this post brings you 15 of these tips in detail, covering everything from how the ideal headline formulas to how to design and position your call to action (CTA).

But first, the basics.

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Accounting processes from invoicing to reporting

Businesses of all sizes have to deal with accounting and it can be a bit difficult if you’re new to it.

Without an effective accounts receivable process, you risk losing out on valuable revenue.

If you don’t put a process in place for your accounts payable then you could be facing late payment charges or even opening up space for fraud.

Accounting is vital to the health of a business and too many companies overlook it. In the UK, the Association of Accounting Technicians revealed that SMEs were “leaking” £2.9bn every year through poor accounting practices.

This is why we’ve created 11 checklists to guide you through your accounting processes.

Using the checklists

You don’t need to be a CPA to create a balance sheet or an invoice. Our checklists enable anyone to perform accounting activities, and as you go through you’ll see the different steps explained where necessary. This way, you know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

With these Process Street checklists, you’ll see how you can integrate Process Street with Zapier and Quickbooks to automate accounting processes, saving you time and money.

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We always seem to be caught up in a never-ending mission to make our businesses better.

You have to ride out crises, fight through external problems, and still improve your performance week on week, quarter on quarter, year on year.

So how do we approach this improvement to get the most from it?

The key is about making improvement part of the daily process.

This approach falls under the umbrella of continuous improvement; what Toyota call Kaizen.

This is the art of taking a million steps forward. Compounding every success and safeguarding against every failure.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:

• Why Kaizen is important
• What are the other Toyota Production System concepts?
• Things to consider when implementing Kaizen.
• How Samsung use Kaizen selectively to optimize production

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How do you know that your audience likes what you’re doing? Are they interested in what you’re saying and getting involved in the ways that you want them to be?

To know that, you need to be tracking your audience engagement. To help you do that, we here at Process Street have broken down the what, how, and why of audience engagement in this post.

This post will show you:

• What audience engagement is (without the jargon)
• Why it matters
• The 8 elements to track and assess it
• How SEO can damage your engagement

Whether you want to know why your traffic is healthy but your products aren’t selling or you just want to know how to improve your current operations and get more value out of your efforts, this is the post for you.

Let’s begin.

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The following is a guest post from Ryan Gould, Vice President of Strategy and Marketing Services at Elevation Marketing. An expert search, social and content marketer, Ryan leads Elevation Marketing’s digital strategy department, helping brands achieve their business goals, such as improving sales and market share, by developing integrated marketing strategies distinguished by research, storytelling, engagement and conversion.

Without software, you’d be hand-writing purchase orders, using a Rolodex for a CRM, and doing your newsletters via smoke signal.

Alright, maybe that last one is a little far-fetched, but there’s no denying that in the business world, technology is absolutely necessary and enables amazing things.

…But not everyone on your team gets enthusiastic about the prospect of learning a new tool. Even if that tool will help them improve productivity, do a better job, and escape the white-collar equivalent of hard manual labor.

Your goal when rolling out software is always the same: to help your business improve operations, boost efficiency, and enable sales. These days that means staying up to date on technological trends as well.

Deciding which tool is right for you will always hinge on fundamentals, like whether it can automate your vendor payments, purchase orders, employee onboarding, lead management, etc. However, there are other considerations, such as whether your solution integrates with cloud software and is responsive on mobile devices.

But, even after you’ve selected the solution perfect for your operation and your employees – after all the sales demos, comparison docs, and review reading – you’ll find it’s that the human element that trips you up.

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Bitcoin, Cryptocurrencies, Blockchain.

Together, these various buzzwords form a distributed ledger of hype!

The potential for a new decentralized world has led investors, writers, bankers, entrepreneurs and more to herald various versions and aspects of this new technology as representing the future of humanity.

A World Economic Forum survey even suggested that 10% of global GDP would be stored on the blockchain by 2027.

There is a lot of excitement about the direction the technology is heading, but the tech behind Bitcoin has existed for a while now and we’re yet to see much mainstream integration of it.

Which begs the question: what can the blockchain be used for?

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:

• What is the blockchain?
• 5 use cases where the blockchain could thrive
• How the blockchain could be utilized in business process management

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Those of us in the workflow game know Nintex is one of the big tools available on the market.

Their advanced software is great for plotting out complex workflows, running intricate automations, and integrating tightly and natively with other large corporate tools.

But that’s what it is: corporate.

It’s heavy and less agile than many of its competitors, with a restrictive price tag which puts it squarely into the enterprise market.

The Nintex light-version, which comes in at a more reasonable price point, simply doesn’t compete with the other tools that target the small-to-medium business space. It has less features and less functionality than many of the newer and more innovative up-and-comers.

In this Process Street article, we’re going to tackle that niche. What are better examples of workflow software for a small to medium sized enterprise, without missing out on complex functionality?

Let’s take a look.

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A value statement isn’t some kind of jargon speak for “what we think matters”. It’s a statement of what your company is, what it stands for, and what everyone can expect from it.

It’s the “soul” of your team.

“Culture is living values.

Values are written words, and your culture is how you actually live [them].” – Jeff Lawson, Articulating Company Values & Living Them Authentically: Jeff Lawson

Whether you need to unite your team around a core set of ideals, show potential recruits what to expect and how to act or resonate with your core audience, these values are an essential part of any coherent company. Without defining them everyone will be working on their own assumptions.

So, how do you create a value statement that’s effective, concise, direct and, most importantly, accurately reflects your company?

To answer that, let’s dive straight in.

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