Business Clinic


IT


You are never too old to use new technology


BENJAMIN DYER is the CEO of Powered Now. Powered Now aims to take the pain out of admin and paperwork for trade businesses like gas engineers, electricians, builders, and many more.


www.powerednow.com


AS we all get older, we have a tendency to become set in our ways. After all, if something has worked well for 30 years, why should we change?


But life moves on and most of us move on with it. The car that I drive is faster, more economical, corners better and costs less in real terms than a car from 30 years ago.


So, if we accept progress for motor cars, what is the logic of rejecting it when it comes to paperwork? In fact, why don’t we accept that smartphone apps can be just another tool in the box?


Ease of use Historically there haven’t been any computer systems to help small trade businesses. That was for several reasons. PC based systems were typically clunky and hard to use. At the same time, they were completely unsuitable for use by someone who was always out and about on the road.


This is where things have really changed. Smartphones now have many times the power of a traditional computer and are virtually always connected. At the same time there has been a positive revolution in terms of ease of use. Pretty much everyone can use a smartphone.


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Reliability As anyone knows who has lost their black book, this is a real problem. Most tradespeople don’t experience this, but I’m sure you get the picture. It represents an ever-present risk for your business. And one which can be avoided.


You might think that the risk is greater with an app. Smartphones are notorious for being broken, lost or stolen. The good news is that a decent system will be always backing itself up to “the cloud”. So, if your smartphone is lost, stolen or broken, everything is still available. It can all still be accessed on a desktop, laptop or tablet or a new smartphone.


Time saving A decent app will be able to copy customer information from your smartphone’s contacts, will be able to look up addresses from the postcode and use other tricks to keep keystrokes to a minimum. It will even let you dictate in order to record details of jobs in text form! And that should just be the tip of the iceberg.


It should let you price up jobs by pulling in items from your favourite catalogue, keep track of who owes you money and raise an invoice from a quote with a single click.


And much more besides.


More jobs won, more work invoiced The cynics among readers will doubt that more work can be won and invoiced with a smartphone app and it’s true that results will vary. However, the ways that these benefits can happen are as follows:


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It’s much quicker and easier to create quotes. If you create quotes faster you can win more business and achieve better prices.


• Your paperwork should look more professional.


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When it’s easier to invoice, you are more likely to invoice for the little extras that you are entitled to.


What’s not to like? As we get older it does become harder to learn new tricks. But most of us have adapted to smartphones and don’t find them too hard to use. It’s difficult to see why investing a bit more effort (and yes it does take some effort) to use a smartphone app to run the business doesn’t make sense.


Why not give it a try?

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