Why Doesn’t My Business Software Work Together?

A business can have good software and still have a frustrating system.

Your website may work well. Your CRM may do exactly what you need it to do. Your accounting software may handle billing without any problems. You may also have separate tools for scheduling, documents, email, ecommerce, reporting, and project management.

The difficulty often appears when work needs to move from one of those tools to another.

Software is usually chosen one problem at a time

Most businesses do not sit down one day and design every piece of software they will ever use.

Software gets added as the business needs it.

You need accounting software, so you choose one. Later, you need a CRM. Someone introduces a project management tool. Your website gets rebuilt. A scheduling application is added. A spreadsheet fills a gap that none of the other tools address.

Years later, you may have a collection of useful applications that were never really designed to work together.

That is normal, but it can create unnecessary work.

Look at what happens when work moves between tools

The easiest way to find these problems is to follow a common process.

Consider what happens when someone becomes a new customer.

They may begin on your website, move into your CRM, receive documents through email, appear in your accounting software, and eventually become part of a project managed somewhere else.

How does their information make each of those moves?

If an employee has to copy information, download files, create records, update spreadsheets, or send internal notifications every time the process moves from one application to another, your employees may be doing work that your systems could handle for them.

Not every application needs to do everything

It can be tempting to solve this problem by finding one large application that promises to handle the entire business.

That can work in some situations, but it is not always necessary.

A specialized application may be very good at the job you purchased it to perform. Replacing it simply because another part of your system is causing problems can create more disruption than it solves.

A better question is whether the tools you already rely on can share the information they need.

Sometimes they can already do this and simply have not been configured to do so. Sometimes an automation can connect a few steps. In other cases, a small amount of custom functionality may be needed to fill a gap.

Start with the process that causes the most frustration

You do not need to solve every software problem at once.

Choose a process employees complain about or one that consumes more time than it should. Follow it across every application involved and pay attention to the moments when someone has to step in.

Ask what that person is doing.

If they are reviewing information, making a decision, speaking with a customer, or handling an unusual situation, their involvement may be valuable.

If they are copying information, creating the same record somewhere else, checking whether something happened, or telling another employee that a routine step is complete, there may be an opportunity to improve the system.

Your business software does not have to live inside one application to work well together. What matters is whether the overall process makes sense for the people using it.