5 Reasons to Move Your Service Business into the Cloud, Now

Your company is expanding. A new department across the hall today. Perhaps a new city tomorrow. You’re bigger and growing faster every day, servicing an ever-expanding region – but now you’re feeling some growing pains. Your pieced-together software solutions, spreadsheets, and paper-based systems might have been fine when you were running a plucky startup, but now they’re dragging you down. You know that your current system is causing too many mistakes to happen, but change is hard.

The writing is on the wall. And your company is already too sophisticated to be relying on writing on actual walls. It’s time to put your business into the cloud. What’s the cloud? It’s just a buzzword for a network of servers on the internet. But current technology makes it so that your data security doesn’t rely on a single server, or even co-location hosting, but a distributed and secure network.

Here are 5 reasons you can’t afford to wait any longer:

1. Easy Integration of Business Software in Your Office

There’s a cost to inefficiency – and to not growing when you should. “Vonigo has become a core part of our day-to-day operations and is allowing us to expand our business efficiently across multiple locations,” says Brad Sarkauskas, Co-Founder of Jack of All Trades Handyman. Before that company moved to a cloud-based system, Brad was stuck with desktop software that made it difficult to share data in with people in his own office, much less his team in the field. Your software is supposed to be a tool to make things easier, not make every day a struggle to make sure your Excel spreadsheets do their jobs.

2. Improve Business Operations Outside the Office

Before most companies make the switch to the cloud, employees in the field are often limited to improvising notes, emails and voice recordings that are going to have to be input later. That means your company could be paying administrators to replicate work that’s already being done. If they’re using a paper-based process, the costs and inefficiencies compound over time. The cost of paper, ink and file storage is bad enough, but when employees have to go looking for paper records, the damage really adds up.

This kind of situation is where Vonigo’s accounting feature really pays off. On-site service workers can prepare invoices and email them to clients in seconds, while exporting them directly into Quickbooks desktop or online. Your accounting information is all centralized, ready to be shared with the people who need it. The days of tracking down a six-month old invoice from under Benson’s chair are long gone.

3. Going Paperless

No more printing costs! Some companies will see major savings on this one— consider a business that’s been around for years, with large filing cabinets filled with paper records. They’re looking to rent the office next door and knock down the wall in between for space to accommodate four more employees for their growing firm. But what if they could simply eliminate that large bank of filing cabinets against the wall? Put the important stuff in cheaper storage, and put that space to use.

That’s just one idea for a company that feels the need to maintain a large headquarters; but going further, a lean company that puts its operations into the cloud may no longer need a large central office at all. Running a virtual office in the cloud, a service company’s managers and dispatchers can work from anywhere, sending their technicians to visit clients, all without racking up large leasing or rental costs.

4. Mitigating Security Risks

Cloud applications handle security upgrades without the customer even knowing. There’s no lag between when a software maker creates a patch and the client installing it, removing a window for hackers to steal data or otherwise disrupt your business services. Downtime of even a few hours per year to fix a security glitch and reboot your data from a secure backup carries immediate costs — and if word gets out (as it sometimes does) that the company has been hacked, clients may take their business elsewhere. Cloud security saves you time and money.

5. Your Competitors Are Doing It

The cost savings from moving to the cloud are so substantial that entire business sectors have already made the move. If your competitors are already seeing savings of 5, 10, or 15 percent from making the switch, they’re going to plow those savings into improving their offerings, or just passing on those savings for their customers. Beat them to the punch!

Take your business to the next level. Into the stratosphere, figuratively speaking. It’s time to get your systems into the cloud. Learn more about how to get you started.