Generating and sending invoices can be a time-consuming process. A properly designed invoice helps a business get paid and provides legal protection for both parties.

Think about it, all the hours and energy you put into completing a project will have an invoice at the end of it. Invoices are the tool that provides freelancers with the ability to receive income. That’s why we over at Process Street sat down and thought up a way to make getting paid even easier; a template which serves as a custom invoice generator.

Never again worry about charging your clients the wrong amount, or even sending them an invoice with an outdated logo or set of information. All you need to do is plug your information into this template and away you go!

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Pinch analysis is a difficult topic to talk about, as it both has widely applicable techniques which can reduce the need for external resources, but it’s traditionally very complicated and used in a limited business sector.

That’s why today I’ll be breaking down the topic and showing how the principles behind it can be used across any and all disciplines.

You don’t have to be a thermodynamics buff to understand this; it all comes down to analyzing what you have, what by-products your processes create, and whether you can use those by-products to your advantage.

By doing this, traditional pinch analysis is able to typically result in energy savings of 10-35% – that’s a third less energy you need to generate or import to carry out your processes.

Lets’ get stuck in.
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The following is a guest post by professional copywriter and freelance writer Michael Schultheiss, owner of Inkwell Freelance.

Imagine if your support staff had no set guidelines for handling a ticket.

It would be like you pulled in a group of random people from the street, sat them down at the helpdesk, and expected to see a job well done.

Instead of a job well done, it’d probably look more like this:

That’s essentially what you’re allowing when you fail to standardize processes. Your company’s operations consist of tasks that must be completed on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis to ensure that it runs smoothly. But if these processes aren’t standardized, you’re inviting chaos.

These could be core processes like dealing with a customer support request, or tasks that recur less often like SSL certificate renewal.

Every task — regardless of how often you do it — requires rules that define the scope, quality, and methods to be followed. If you don’t standardize these rules, you can’t have visibility over whether you’re ensuring quality and reducing human error.

In short, running your business will be an operational nightmare.

To help you avoid that, in this article we’ll look at process standardization as follows:

• What is process standardization?
• The benefits of standardization
• Common concerns about standardization
• How Process Street can help you standardize

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Being secure online is of greater and greater importance. As businesses operate almost entirely online and sensitive information finds itself living full time in the cloud, we have to make sure we have appropriate measures in place to keep information safe.

One tried and tested way of promoting security is the use of failsafes in login systems. This is what’s referred to as Two Factor Authentication (2FA) or Multi Factor Authentication (MFA).

This means that someone could get hold of your email and password, yet your data is still kept safe.

Whether you’re already familiar with the terminology or not, you’re certainly familiar with the concept.

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

• Why is two factor authentication important?
• What two factor authentication is
• The 2 classic examples of 2FA: banks and Apple
• How you can implement two factor authentication in your team
• Free Process Street template: How to enable two factor authentication with Authy, Google, and Slack

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[ Download our Free Ebook ] – Click here to download our free 111 page ebook on “How to automate the tasks you hate at work using Zapier“.

Business vs Casual, Zapier vs IFTTT

Whether it’s Coke vs Pepsi, Ariel vs Persil or Hawaiian pizza vs everything good in the world, rivalries are everywhere. They make for fantastic spectator sports and can help improve our lives by showing the flaws in each side.

In our efforts to help you guys automate as much of the laborious shovel work in your lives as possible, we came across two main competitors; the great battle that is Zapier vs IFTTT.

Okay, so maybe “battle” is over-dramatizing things a little; it’s not as if they’re running massive smear campaigns. Still, the competition is real, as both Zapier and IFTTT have earned their spots on the map for being darned good pieces of kit. This got us thinking; which is better?

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Like any employee who works at a young startup, last month I was given a task which threw me far out of my depth.

Even though I’m an audio tech graduate whose final project was video-based, I can’t say that my skills destroying VHS tapes and creating feedback loops translated too well.

Either way, the task was clear:

Create a 5-minute demo video for Process Street showing off most of the features, with screen recordings and slides.

It took me much longer than it should have. But, in the end, I polished it off nicely and got back to doing what I’m better at — writing articles (phew).

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Tracking your work and what you do may sound a little simple (however, we’ve proven before that it’s not necessarily the case). But just imagine having lots of people working on the same project at the same time. That’s when it actually becomes not so easy to track what’s going on.

Online collaboration tools are on the rise with businesses who want to track their employee’s workflow – especially remotely. You might have already seen our previous article comparing Asana and Trello, but instead of comparing the user experience we will look at the features and usability of each app.

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No matter how foolproof you think your operations are, human error will always pose a threat. Heck, it’s already responsible for 52% of security and data breaches, was the root cause of a host of famous tragedies, and can strike at any time.

But what exactly is human error, and how can we limit its effects if it can’t be completely prevented?

To answer that question, we here at Process Street have broken it down for you. In this article, you’ll learn:

• The four types of human error
• How the different types of human error are caused
• The single technique to combat each type in your business

It’s time to stop leaving your success open to random chances of failure.

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The following is a guest post by Darren Chait, Co-Founder at Hugo. Hugo is the meeting note platform that keeps your team connected with what your customers are thinking and saying. It enables fast-moving teams to make meeting insights shareable and actionable in their existing tools.

As a startup guy, my world is full of buzzwords. We’re disrupting a space, have pivoted, got our minimum valuable product (MVP) out to our total addressable market (TAM) and even had a ‘.ai’ domain name. Undoubtedly, one of my ‘favorites’ is ‘team alignment’.

While team alignment is not a new concept and certainly not unique to fast-growing technology businesses, I’m fascinated with my peers’ obsession with this utopian concept. It’s understandable. Why wouldn’t you want your team moving forward in unison with precise coordination and execution? Why wouldn’t you listen when experts warn that misalignment kills startups?

In this guest post, I’ll share our story and perspective on team alignment and some easy-to-implement solutions to achieve this ideal state with your team.

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Have you ever had a project which never seems to end? One which you either underestimated or kept adding tasks to as you went along?

That’s exactly what setting out your project scope will prevent.

By analyzing the elements of your projects before starting, you can set out the scope of the work in order to prevent extra work getting added (without adjusting the necessary resources) and avoid taking on projects too large for your team to handle.

Not to mention that the principles behind project scope can be applied elsewhere in your business too.

“I call this the Scopi-locks principle.

Don’t make your product too big, because no-one will adopt it. Don’t make your product too small, because it’s not worth adopting. You have to [get it] just right such that it’s worth poor people pulling it into their lives and, when they do, that they get some value out of it.” – Des Traynor (co-founder of Intercom) on product scope

Let’s get stuck right in with project scope by breaking down what it is, what you need to know before creating it, and how to use it in action.

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