Major setbacks. Lengthy delays. Unnecessary bottlenecks. When important items aren’t rejected or approved in time, progress is halted.

Take the United States’ government shutdown in 2019.

The shutdown meant the U.S. Small Business Administration – which backs entrepreneurs and small businesses with financial loans – could no longer approve loan applications.

The result? Small businesses turned to high-cost, short-term lenders, entrepreneurs couldn’t buy the necessary products their business relied upon, and the delay itself caused widespread anxiety among those who were relying on loans being granted. Financially-speaking, the lack of approvals caused a delay of $2 billion in SBA lending.

At Process Street (if you don’t know our app, it’s state-of-the-art BPM software!) we know how important it is for teams to get items approved or rejected, so that business processes and projects can be completed on time.

That’s why we’ve introduced approvals.

With approvals, decision-makers can give the go-ahead (or rejection) regarding important items, on top of providing any necessary comments.

Want to know more about this game-changing feature and how it can dramatically improve workflows for your team? Read through the following sections:

• A brief explanation of approvals
• Supercharge approvals with Process Street’s features
• Using approvals in Process Street
• Approval use case #1: Holiday and time-off requests
• Approval use case #2: Client onboarding
• Approval use case #3: The hiring process
• Approval use case #4: The time-strapped CEO
• You can approve (or reject) tasks directly from your phone’s email app
• Harness the power of a simplified approval workflow today!

Now, let’s dive straight in.

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For over half a decade now, the team at Process Street has been creating stellar content so that businesses around the world can become the best they can be.

In terms of numbers, that’s nearly 1,000 on-site business blog posts we’ve published!

Considering this vast swathe of content, there may be a few times where, if you’re a veteran reader, you’ve missed posts that would’ve been high-value resources for your business.

Similarly, if you’re a new visitor (welcome, by the way! 👋) you may not be sure where to get started.

That’s why we’ve created this roundup post of our greatest business blog posts. To boot, the posts have been categorized into separate sections so you can find relevant content quickly:

• What business content can you expect from the Process Street blog?
• Process Street’s greatest business blog posts, categorized!
• Business blog posts: Automation
• Business blog posts: Case studies
• Business blog posts: Human resources
• Business blog posts: ISO and quality management
• Business blog posts: Marketing
• Business blog posts: Management and organizational theory
• Business blog posts: Property management
• Business blog posts: Productivity
• Business blog posts: Sustainable business
• Business blog posts: Tools and tech
• Business blog posts: Just for fun!
• How does Process Street stand apart from other business blogs?

Now, let’s learn a thing or two. 📚

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Automation has been one of the key emerging trends of the late 2010s, and will likely be a defining characteristic of the 2020s.

It’s something we’ve covered extensively at Process Street, and something we’ve taken huge advantage of internally as well.

The move from companies only providing enterprise-level API access to their software over to commercially available Internet of Things style mass integration has been a dramatic shift in the marketplace. This has opened up huge potential for individuals and small businesses; you can integrate with thousands of services in just a few clicks.

Now, so many services, SaaS products in particular, provide a means to integrate with other platforms that there are very little restrictions on what you can and cannot automate.

Tools like Zapier, Flow, and IFTTT have made these integrations so easy that anyone can set them up.

But they’re not the only ones – new connectors and middlemen are cropping up all the time, helping people without tech skills connect with APIs or Webhooks of their choosing. The No-Code Movement has gone mainstream and it now has a full suite of tools at its disposal.

Even in 2015, according to Chui, Manyika, and Miremadi writing in the Harvard Business Review, not only could a marketing executive be automating activities which account for between 10-15% of their current time using existing technology, but for 60% of existing US jobs, 30% of their time could be reduced by automation.

For those interested in that kind of thing, you should check out Four Fundamentals of Workplace Automation by McKinsey. An illuminating text which is already somewhat out of date!

Here at Process Street, we integrate with thousands of other apps and platforms via Zapier, we have large customers making use of our API, and we’ve now added webhooks to our array of automation options to try to cover the rest of the use cases our customers tell us about.

In this article, we’ll look at:

• What are webhooks?
• What do people use webhooks for?
• What is the difference between webhooks and APIs?
• How do I use webhooks?
• How do Process Street webhooks work?

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“To put it bluntly, goals are for losers… goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary.” – Scott Adams, Scott Adams’ Secret of Success: Failure

Matching up systems vs goals might seem odd but the truth is that you should be using one and not the other.

Let’s be honest – we’ve all set goals that we’ve never met.

From broken New Year’s resolutions to a failed career as the next big rockstar, goals have a nasty habit of not being met.

Scott Adams, the author of Dilbert thinks much the same in his book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life.

He identifies that everything wrong with goals can be solved by instead applying a regular system to complete your tasks.

I scoffed at first but then realized that I’d done precisely that to lose 70 lbs in six months and learn the piano.

That’s why today I’ll cover:

• What are goals?
• What are systems?
• Systems vs goals
  • Systems replace motivation with routine
  • Goals are hard to follow up on
  • Systems are consistently rewarding
  • Goals carry a more negative mindset
  • Systems are more realistic and flexible
• Turning goals into systems
• How to build systems

Let’s get started!

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It was my first time visiting Sweden, and somehow I found myself hauling two baskets of milk containers to deliver to the local supermarket. Feeling like a recycling heroine, my ego was soon deflated when I realized my efforts were something of commonality in this country.

Recycling is part of the Swedish supermarket’s environmental management strategy and has contributed to the country’s 99% recycling rate. It is results such as these that make Sweden one of the most environmentally friendly countries in the world.

In fact, many Swedish corporations place the present and prevailing problems facing our environment on a pedestal. Why?

If you read my last post on business sustainability, you will understand how the environment impacts our economy. It is due to this deep-seated connection between economies and ecosystems that make environmental management so important.

Environmental management acts to safeguard nature from potentially damaging business operations, constructing a win-win situation benefitting the economy and the environment.

In this article, we at Process Street explain exactly what environmental management is, why it is needed, and how you can implement environmental management into your business today. We also have a bunch of free templates to help you apply Environmental Management strategies.

Let’s crack on and find out exactly what environmental management is.

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Sometimes the full range of process management features can be overwhelming.

We here at Process Street know that we can’t please everyone. However, if you’re going to use a Process Street alternative, we’d rather tell you about them from our own accounts than throw a bunch of marketing at you.

That’s why we’re covering some common Process Street alternatives in today’s post.

To skip to a particular section, use the links below:

• Process Street (for context)
• Process Street alternatives
  • Office 365 (Microsoft Word)
  • Google Suite (Google Docs)
  • Airtable
  • Trello
  • Asana
  • LucidChart
• What’s your choice?

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$4,129 is the estimated cost of a new hire, making that empty chair an expensive one to fill.

You want to get your hiring process right. You want to hire the ideal candidate. But where do you start?

At Process Street, we say you start your recruitment process by writing a solid job description.

This is no easy task, you have around 14 seconds to convince applicants that your job is the perfect job for them.

Get your job description right, and you can draw in the most qualified, skilled and well-fitting applicants.

This is why Process Street has created these 14 easy and free to use job description templates, for you to obtain the best applicants for your advertised role. Our 14 job description templates are listed below:

• Accountant Job Description Template
• Copywriter Job Description Template
• Customer Service Manager Job Description Template
• Customer Service Representative Job Description Template
• Editor Job Description Template
• Graphic Designer Job Description Template
• HR Manager Job Description Template
• IT Manager Job Description Template
• Marketing Manager Job Description Template
• Receptionist Job Description Template
• Sales Manager Job Description Template
• Software Developer Job Description Template
• Web Designer Job Description Template
• Web Developer Job Description Template

Before we jump into these templates, let’s take a moment to consider what a job description template is, and why they are needed.

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Your average pitch gets examined by investors for about 3 minutes 44 seconds and (if successful) is worth around $1.3 million.

That’s more than $5800 per second.

With figures like that, you need to know how to pitch to land investors, customers, employees, prizes or whatever it is you’re aiming for.

That’s where we here at Process Street come in.

We pitched to over 2500 top SaaS professionals and investors at SaaStr Europa 2019, walking away with the grand prize from the pitch competition, the contact details of several venture capitalists, and collaboration opportunities for months to come.

However, I’m getting ahead of myself. In this post I’ll show you;

• How to pitch: the basics
• What the SaaStr pitch competition was
• The pitch deck we used to win it
• The results and prizes in detail
• The lessons you can learn from our experience
• The secret technique we used to get even more out of our pitch

Let’s get stuck in.

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Yahoo! lost $350 million to their sale price after the reveal that a security breach had caused 3 billion accounts to be compromised. They learned the hard way that if you have sensitive data you’ll also need measures to protect it.

You need an easy way to secure your processes without providing extra hoops for your team to jump through and get confused over.

That’s why we here at Process Street let you set task permissions in your checklists.

This feature lets you hide tasks from viewers with variable permission levels within your checklists. You’re left with a checklist that shows different tasks to different people based on what you think they should see.

The best thing? It solves your security and clarity issues while providing a singular location for your data to be stored, making it easy to review.

Enough dilly-dallying, let’s get to it!
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Hacking is constantly misunderstood in pop culture.

From an 11-year-old crashing Wall Street and flying through 3D landscapes in Hackers to “hacking” an entire city in Watch Dogs, it’s easy to see why it’s seen as an extreme and dangerous hobby to have.

In reality, there are plenty of “white-hat” (well-intentioned) hackers who help companies to identify security weaknesses in their programs through bug bounties.

So, to de-mystify the air around bug bounty programs and white-hat hacking, this post will show you:

• What bug bounties are
• How you can start earning money through them
• What to consider when setting up your own bug bounty program
• 20 examples of top bug bounty programs you can take inspiration from or take part in yourself

Let’s get started.

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