As you know I’ve just been on holiday. We stayed in 3 different towns/cities on the edge of the map! I had to download three different German maps to my satnav in order to drive a total of about 5 hours.
This made me think about how wonderful it is to use integrated applications for business (because I often think about my business when I’m not busy working in it!)
We are a Xero based firm so there are over 1,000 integrated apps available in the official app store and other unofficial ones too. The ones we use most are:
Gocardless – raise an invoice in Xero and it automatically collects the direct debits and matches the payment to the invoice so it saves bookkeeping time too.
Dext/Hubdoc – clients can scan/photograph/email invoices to upload them into Xero (also QBO or Freeagent) where they, or we, can do their bookkeeping. Dext is the most expensive but saves much more time with their OCR (optical character recognition) and machine learning changing the roll of the bookkeeper to checking rather than typing.
Clarity – this is a big hit with clients as we can help them to see their numbers in a simple format and decide how they want to grow their business. The software uploads the latest info from Xero (also Sage or spreadsheet) so that we can discuss the current situation and improvements. It then helps to prepare an action list for the client.
These are the most valuable integrations that we use. What do you have on your list?