Create Efficiencies for Your Business

As a business owner, running your business efficiently is likely at the top of your priority list. An inefficient business leads to wasted resources, poor company culture, and can even open you up to serious liability. Here are some tips to streamline your day-to-day business operations, save money, and find new levels of success.

Use Treasury Management Services

Choosing a financial partner that has the tools and expertise you need is critical to long-term success. The right bank can offer services to help you simplify and automate daily financial processes.

These tools, commonly referred to as treasury management services, allow you to keep a high level of visibility into your daily balances, automate fund management with a high degree of precision, and even capitalize on your excess cash at competitive rates of return.

Traditionally, monitoring and managing your company’s day-to-day finances, payables, and receivables was a full-time job. For larger companies, entire departments are dedicated to these tasks.

Consolidating funds, moving capital from one account to another, and staying apprised of your balances is time-consuming work that doesn’t necessarily contribute to your bottom line. Most businesses would much rather have another salesperson or manager than an employee dedicated to these tasks.

With treasury management tools like zero balance accounts and sweep services, funds are moved automatically at the end of each business day, according to previously established limits and minimums. This can save time and effort, while giving you a deeper understanding of your company’s financial wellbeing. With that knowledge comes the ability to see looming problems and capitalize on blink-and-you’ll-miss-it opportunities.

The same is true for payables and receivables. Things like Automated Clearing House (ACH) Origination can help you streamline payment processing, while Business Online Bill Pay can help you improve recordkeeping and eliminate late payments with regular, automatic deductions. Other tools, like point-of-sale systems, can increase efficiency while adding convenience for your customers.

Recruit and Maintain an Effective Team

Creating a positive company culture is key to creating efficiency. Job dissatisfaction is one of the leading causes of wasted resources and inefficient use of time. Unhappy employees simply don’t work as hard or efficiently as fulfilled employees.

As you would expect, a positive company culture starts with hiring. Finding candidates who share the same passion and enthusiasm about your product or service, demonstrate the same level of energy, and boast the same work ethic is important. It’s no coincidence that high performance companies always seem to find high performance employees. Highly productive, A-team employees raise the standards of the entire company, and attract more A-team employees.

Thankfully, there are many ways to capitalize on this. Consider using a human services and payroll solution to offer current employees referral awards for new hires and create compelling job listings site that communicate your culture of excellence and commitment to personal and professional growth.

When you find the perfect employees, it’s important to keep them. HR technology solutions like can help you manage your company’s benefits offering with automated administration and simplified open enrollment.

Foster a learning culture in your organization with integrated systems that combines virtual, classroom, mobile and social capabilities on one platform, so employees can learn at their own pace.

Prevent Fraud

Technology is always marching forward. New, game-changing advancements are introduced daily, offering incredible levels of convenience, better customer service, faster transactions, and more customer options than ever before. The most successful businesses use innovative technology to improve their product and process.

But criminals are always working to exploit new technology, gain access to sensitive company networks, and even take advantage of old, outdated hardware and software to steal your proprietary information and syphon your earnings. 

Fraud can damage your business in significant ways and create a cascade of inefficiencies in its wake. Often, fixing damage from fraud requires redirecting important team members or funds that would have been used to capitalize on other opportunities.

While it’s not possible to prevent all fraud, implementing some best practices can save you significant headaches in the future.

First, you’ll want to choose a financial partner that offers the latest in fraud prevention technology. You’ll want to check for tools like Positive Pay, which helps to identify discrepancies in check numbers and dollar amounts, and ACH Filter, which identifies unauthorized ACH transfers before they even post.

Next, you’ll want to do some regular due diligence, including:

• Updating your software
• Backing up your most important files
• Requiring passwords for all laptops, tablets, and smartphones
• Encrypting devices that contain sensitive information
• Using multi-factor authentication to keep your network secure

Finally, it’s important to remember that there’s no substitute for regular training, especially when it comes to recognizing email phishing attempts. Things like verifying the email sender’s identity, not clicking on suspect links or attachments, and never sending usernames and passwords may sound basic, but they are messages that should be repeated frequently.

Choose a Local Financial Partner

When looking for the best bank for your business, consider one that’s local. Local banks know the business landscape inside and out because they live and operate in that region every day. They’ll take the time to understand your unique business, assess your current needs, and help you choose the best products and services to create efficiencies across your entire organization.

But choosing a local bank also brings other benefits, especially when it comes to loan decisions. Business opportunities don’t wait around. Capitalizing on opportunities can mean the difference between your business thriving or becoming another failed startup statistic. When time is of the essence, you don’t want to be waiting on loan decisions from another state, or even another country. Choose a bank that offers an easy application process and local loan decisions.

We want to help your business become as efficient as possible. One of our local business experts will take the time to learn about where your business is now, and where it’s going in the future. We’ll match the best product and service to your needs and walk with you on your business journey.