Connect Your Software to Increase Your Productivity

When you’re running a business, there’s a lot to keep track of: accounting, sales, deliveries, customer service and so much more. You’re probably using all kinds of mobile and online applications to manage the work you do, but are you connecting them together to save yourself valuable time and effort?’

Imagine that you change a contact’s phone number in your CRM and your address book is automatically updated with the new information. Or as you compose an email to schedule a meeting, you insert your availability into the message without switching to your calendar. Or you process a credit card payment and it’s automatically registered in your accounting software. All of these things can be accomplished with integrations, plug-ins, add-ons or extensions—different ways of sharing information between apps.

Browser Extensions
Every popular desktop browser has a way of adding new functions to it, like Firefox’s Add-Ons or the Chrome Web Store, and there are a number of extensions that improve your experience with applications you’re already using. For example, if you use Gmail, there are loads of browser extensions that will add tools directly to your inbox. Boomerang for Gmail lets you schedule outgoing emails or “boomerangs” incoming messages to the top of your inbox at a later time. And Boomerang Calendar allows you to propose meeting times right in an email message for easy scheduling. There are tools for monitoring and publishing to your WordPress blog, accessing LinkedIn profiles and signing documents—all from within your current browser window.

Product Integrations
It’s common for web-based software (or “SaaS software”) to include connections to other online apps, from marketing to accounting to file storage. The next time you open an app, check for integrations on the company website or in your settings. Our Insightly’s integrations page is a good example, where we list connections to and from our CRM for software like QuickBooks Online, Dropbox, Boomerang for Gmail and many more. With our QuickBooks Online integration, you can view a customer’s invoices and payments directly from their CRM record, so there’s no need to log in to QuickBooks to check on an invoice status. Some of these integrations are built by Insightly and others are built by the connecting services, all to make our common customers’ lives easier. Using integrations to connect your apps is a smart way to boost productivity and keep your data updated in multiple places.

Integration Services
If the product you’re using doesn’t have the integration you need, there are still other options to explore. Integration services like Zapier, FlowXO and Podbox can be set up as bridges between applications. They work by creating a trigger in one system that prompts an action in another system. One example is adding a new contact in your CRM, which could trigger a welcome email from your marketing software. Another would be to automatically create a Facebook post on your company page whenever you have a new blog entry on WordPress. It’s not a bad idea to map out the triggers and actions on paper or a whiteboard to help you plan the setup. Integration services fill in the gaps when there is no other option available.

Ultimately, there is no single application that includes every tool you need to run a business, so integrations can help you reduce data entry time and be much more productive. Some of these options will take effort to set up, but it’s likely you’ll see a payoff very quickly. Think through the possibilities: If it takes you 30 minutes to set up an integration and it saves you only 5 minutes a day, you’ll already be saving time within the first week of using it. That’s a great return on the time you invest!

About the author: Tony Roma is Insightly’s Content Manager. With a knack for finding the best way to accomplish a task, he’s been helping businesses improve their workflows for over ten years.