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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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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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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Even tech giants have humble beginnings.

In the halcyon days when Google was making the transition from a bedroom to a rented garage in Menlo Park, it won’t surprise you to learn they didn’t have a tight onboarding process in place.

For years Google ran on a single, sprawling spreadsheet including a ranked list of the company’s top 100 projects. The projects were confusingly graded on a scale between “far out” and “skunkworks”, and the founders handled the process with a ‘who cares’ attitude.

Since that point, everyone knows Google has made leaps not only in the Internet space but also in the workplace. The company is the #3 world’s most valuable brand and the #3 best employer in America. Its made extremely effective tweaks to its hiring process over the years, but what isn’t reported as often is its approach to new employee onboarding — the process of getting a new hire equipped with everything they need to integrate into the company culture, work effectively and succeed.

The wackier aspects of Google’s orientation process are widely known. We’ve heard about the Noogler beanies with motorized propellers, and the Mountain View all-Noogler TGIF meetings where the founders “just come in and make some dad jokes”. The inner workings of the process, however — the parts that make it so notoriously effective — aren’t as obvious.

In this article, I’m going to run through the nuts and bolts of Google’s ‘just in time’ employee onboarding process, and some of the supporting events that happen during.

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At Process Street, we’re always asked about the best ways to construct, track, and analyze processes.

There are loads of techniques in the school of business process management to help you with these three concerns but in this article, we’re going to give you an introduction to process mining; a data driven way to create, understand, and optimize your processes.

We’ll cover:

• What is process mining?
• 9 process mining tools to automate your analysis
• How to act on your mined results to optimize your processes

We cover solutions for enterprises all the way down to basic approaches for startups. Jump in!

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The commercial drone industry is still young – it desperately needs processes for compliance and efficiency

With all of the excitement surrounding commercial drone applications, it’s more important than ever to ask yourself – do you have the tools in place to maximize the potential of your drone fleet?

Without the proper tools to build and refine the perfect business processes, you risk wasting resources trying to figure out sub-optimal approaches to common problems.

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The following is a guest post from graphic designer and copywriter Erik Fessler.

What do you think is worse: sitting for 100 days because you didn’t know what direction to travel in, or going for 100 days down the wrong path?

Here’s the good news:

This question doesn’t matter if you have a reliable and logical process to find the right direction.

Brainstorming is the key to finding that direction, and it’s something you can implement for your team in a logical, structured way. With that in place, you can use that process as a reliable way to generate ideas, iterate upon them, and harness the power of your team’s combined creative energy to make real business change. That is, if you can build and optimize your brainstorming process…

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Introducing Form Fields

It’s been a long time coming but we are beyond excited to announce that you can now add form fields to your process checklists in Process Street.

Check out the short video below for an intro to forms.

Form fields allow you to collect and store important data within set fields in your checklists.
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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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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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