Making back-office easy: Unique benefits of the Control Panel
What is a back-office other than a portion of a company that’s kept away from client’s eyes? Well, it’s also an inevitable part of any business that covers multiple operations without which a company can't exist.
You need accounting, tax reporting, HR, legal, and financial management even if you’re a solopreneur. And when you engage more people in the business, equity management, IT, and other optional stuff comes in.
So, what else is a back-office? The most common answer… is pain. In this article, we tell why SME entrepreneurs spend so much time and money managing their back-offices and still feel confused, and Enty fixes the problem.
What’s Wrong with Current Back-Office
Pain #1. Services for each back-office operation are separated
Let’s start with primary documents. You need a way to keep issue invoices and keep them in check. So, you google ‘invoice generator’ and find a bunch of those easily.
There are even free invoice generators. But since you’re a businessman, you probably need some extra features, such as the ability to edit invoices after issuance and a way to safely store your invoices. So, you’ll probably go for some service that has those features and will pay for a subscription.
Then, you get some recurrent transfers and decide to sign a contract with a business partner. You’ll probably google ‘contact generator’ then, huh? Paper snowball is growing, tax due dates get closer — you look for an ‘accounting tool for a small business. So, now you have at least 3 subscriptions but probably even more as we’ve covered just a tip of the iceberg.
The problem is that current solutions automate 1-2 parts of the back-office. You can issue invoices with these digital guys, then collect them to do accounting with others, and customize digital banking with third parties.
Pain #2. Costs of back-office tools are high
Some statistics to consider: European SMEs spend about 2.5% of the revenue on tax compliance only, while the average UK startup spends around £22K on back-office operations in its first year.
Where do such numbers come from? Several separate subscriptions are not already a little money in total. Given that you also will take some human advisory as like for tax reporting, the total amount may be doubled.
And then you start integrating these external services with each other to contribute to your company's profile. Here we have incoming money evidenced by these invoices reflected in this report, etc. The integration requires engaging a workforce of developers that, again, takes extra money.
As an alternative, you can do integration through Integromat or similar software. But, sill, it will take an indefinite amount of your resources given that the final result of assembly might look like this:
Pain #3. Your back-office tools don’t provide you with a complete picture
Even if you are willing to fork out for good integration and automatization of back-office, you have no idea how to build it. And you really shouldn’t. An entrepreneur must focus on running the business, not diving into the intricacies of back-office operations and how to connect them.
And if you postpone the integration, it turns out even worse. Imagine, you have paid for several subscriptions, but in the end, you jump from one to another and still do manual labor downloading your data and collecting it into a new folder on your PC. The prospect looks horrible, right?
Pain #4. Market players aren’t disposed to solve the abovementioned problems
No back-office provider is tended to cover all the operations needed by small business owners. Most solutions give the user 80% of the features they will ever need in the first 20% of their lifecycle. In the remaining time, they either spend time on minor product improvements or make a version for bigger clients.
Human professionals such as accountants, tax advisors, or lawyers also are not motivated to take a wider look at the company’s back-office. One reason is general — all back-office specialists simply hate each other and do not understand the value and responsibilities of the opposite party.
Another reason is typical for small companies. Outsources do their job well, but they are not interested to be involved in the company’s processes deeper. They want to finish their piece of the work and take the next order. And you can’t really blame any of them.
Why Enty’s Control Panel is a Solution
a. A single subscription for 7+ services. It is the control center and data monitor of your company’s back-office. If you have any questions about the back-office, the answer is there.
b. It develops together with your business. In the beginning, we cover the most basic features and then grow each one vertical from 0 to 1.
c. It is not just a collection of different back-office operations under one roof, it is a proper optimization. We reduce the number of actions you have to perform to cover the back-office.
d. It contains in-depth knowledge of back-office. Therefore, it can remind you of something that is legally required to be done and simplistically explain the issues that are not necessary to know.
For example, you may not know when there is a duty to get a VAT number. But since the company’s activity is displayed on the Control Panel, we will see that you need it and point it out to you.
One more example: you may know when you will hire your [first] employee but knowing what to do in this case is harder. So when such a need occurs, just open the Control Panel and click the button ‘hire an employee’.
There is some back-office stuff we haven’t reached yet, but it's a matter of a little time. Consider that we started making the Сontrol Panel a year ago — that is the pace we keep. While we are going there, client managers are always in touch to prompt and navigate you.
