January 21st, 2026, posted in news
by Miruna
You’re so used to managing your business your own way. You think it works, but it’s crumbling from the inside worse than a cookie that’s been baked too long.
When customers complain, cancel subscriptions, employees take too long managing data, creating reports, managing inventory or responding to customers, you’re clearly in trouble.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Your business process might need to be digitalized - using either custom software adapted to your needs, or dedicated software that improves your day to day work life.
This way, your employees would move faster, be more productive, your customers will be better taken care of, and you’ll have an easier time managing your business.
How do you know if you need to digitalize your operations? Well, there are several hints within your day-to-day work life that point to a process that’s inefficient and which could benefit from digitalization.
So in this article, we’re going to name 20 signs that it’s time for your company to digitalize its operations.
1. Manual data entry consuming 10+ hours weekly per employee
How long do your employees spend doing manual data entry? More than 10 hours a week, when it’s not even your main activity, is a little too much. Especially for an activity where you just transfer information from a system to another.
Data entry is a big task, but if it can be automated, there’s no reason why you’d make your employees waste valuable time everyday. Not only is it a waste, but it can become frustrating - it’s a repetitive process that takes a lot of concentration. Your team can get overwhelmed and burnt out.
Software like Docparser, Lido, Parsio or Zapier can help your staff input data much faster, especially if dealing with a lot of documents while having a small team. Alternatively, you can get custom software built, which adapts to your specific needs and ensures better security.
If you build yourself custom software to handle data entry, you can set it up so it suits the data points you need, and thus avoid making multiple spreadsheets, folders, and so on. All data goes in the same place.
Example of a custom CRM tool. Source: https://dribbble.com/shots/26629462-Convertex-CRM-Sales-Analytics-Dashboard-Web-App-Design
2. Multiple Excel spreadsheets as single source of truth
We get it, you like spreadsheets. But sometimes it’s too much. You can’t have critical business data scattered across shared drives with version control issues - worse even if an employee who’s always got the right link happens to quit.
When using lots of different spreadsheets, you’re creating a bit of organized chaos. Yes, you’re inputting data, it’s tagged accordingly and you can use it to generate reports. But you’re also generating too many documents that you’ll take too long finding important information in.
When using a piece of software, especially one built custom for you, you can input data more easily and use filters and advanced search functionality to find what you need quicker. Best of all, all your data is in one place and not scattered across different documents in different Drive folders.
3. Email-based approval processes taking 3+ days
Everybody's busy. But sometimes, not seeing purchase orders, expense reports, or project approvals in time is not because you’re too busy. It’s because they keep being sent to your email, which is already overloaded. You can’t get to them in time because they’re buried underneath other emails.
But do you really need these emails, when all you have to do with them is say yes or no or download them? No, not really. It’s clutter that can go somewhere else where all you do is check for these types of notifications.
And that is your own business management software. In a piece of software built for you, you can choose which processes you want to handle through in-app notifications. You’d be handling reports, orders or approvals all in one place, or you can even assign specific team mates to handle them.
This type of process is a lot more efficient than relying on emails. It’s a better way to separate task types and importance, plus you can directly tackle each task without having to open 10 different emails or conversation threads.
4. Can’t access real-time business metrics
Imagine seeing real-time charts and reports based on your activity whenever you want. You could easily track sales, conversions, more or less successful products & services, active customers, customer location, age or device, and more.
Metrics are highly important for any business endeavor. How can you know what to do next, if you can’t see how your current process is doing? And older, established businesses tend to avoid real-time metrics as monthly or quarterly ones seem more efficient.
But waiting days or weeks for basic performance reports can put a damper on your productivity. Everybody moves so fast nowadays, that making decisions based on monthly data can do more harm than good.
Real-time business metrics are a bit of a challenge on a system, however. If you wish to build your own custom software and include such a feature, do it if it’s truly useful for your business type.
5. Customers complain about slow response times
When customers start to complain, it’s clear you need to change something. The more you wait, the louder their complaints get.
One complaint you could easily avoid is regarding your response times. It’s not always about your manpower or productivity, but sometimes what you’re lacking is a good system that keeps track of items you need to respond to.
Source: https://dribbble.com/shots/20555355-Support-tickets
Once you digitalize your operations, whether you adopt a pre-made system or build custom software, you can quickly receive customer tickets and respond to them within your software. You could customize the way they’re sorted and who would be in charge of each one.
You can also improve your response times through a proper notification system. In your own, custom software, you could manage what kind of notifications you get. To maximise productivity, you could act on tickets, tasks, customer complaints, you name it - right from the notifications panel.
6. Hiring admin staff to handle growing workload
When you need to grow your headcount just to maintain current operational tempo, you might need to take a second and figure out if moving to a more software-centric process can save you more time & resource than hiring.
If whatever you need more people for can be automated, then a better solution would be using software. Building an app custom-made, adapted to your business needs, can help you handle that extra workload. At most, your team will just have to check if it’s running properly.
7. Missing revenue targets due to quote delays
Are you manually generating sales proposals? Taking the time to create Excel files and analyzing tons of data split into different places? You’re probably taking forever to come up with and submit quotes to your clients. And by the time you do, you’ve missed your revenue target.
It’s not productive to spend time manually doing something that software could do for you in a minute or less. It’s inefficient, and you can miss out on business opportunities simply by being too slow.
8. Compliance audit preparation taking weeks
Do you scramble to compile documentation for regulatory requirements? If so, you’re wasting so much time you could easily save through software.
It’s even worse if you keep your paperwork fully analog. The more modern your company is, the more modern your operations should be - so why are you lodging around heavy binders full of paper that you need to carefully flip through during audits?
When storing documents in a piece of software, you can map out file characteristics that will later help you find them easier - such as type, date created, employees in charge, and so on.
9. Inventory discrepancies exceeding 5%
Manually tracking your inventory can be tricky. Humans make mistakes, and at the end of the day, you might end up with completely different numbers and run out of stock unexpectedly. It’s even worse if you track inventory analog, on pieces of paper that can easily get lost.
On the other hand, you can track inventory much easier using software. You can input your initial stock for each product and update it as you sell or move products. Those updates can also be done automatically if you handle sales within the same platform.
10. Cannot scale operations without proportional headcount increase
Growth requires linear increase in staff - but is it always the case? If the growth you aim for is in terms of process or workload, there’s a chance you need to digitalize your operations rather than hire new people.
Hiring more people to do work you can easily automate isn’t very efficient. Not only are you spending extra resources, but you’re making them do repetitive tasks, which can lead to quicker burnout.
Source: https://dribbble.com/shots/18895539-Modern-Admin-Dashboard-UI-Design-for-Flup-Furniture-App-Website
But here’s the thing: moving your process digitally can help avoid that. Tracking documents, generating reports, data analysis, managing teams & customers - all of these can be done quicker through software.
11. Key person dependency risks
It’s a story as old as time. Most companies have a series of business processes only one person knows how to execute. But what happens when they’re not around, or they’re too busy? Do you halt all activities?
Here’s the thing - you don’t have to end up like that. You can assign other team members through a CRM, or your own, custom-made software, or automate at least some of the tasks that person is in charge of.
12. Customer churn due to billing errors
Let’s be real. There are plenty of ways to piss off customers. But one that you can avoid if you digitalize your operations is creating mistake-filled manual invoices. You don’t want to receive payments late, do you? Or have to tell customers, “oops, you actually have to pay us way more”.
Billing errors can be avoided by using software instead. Track orders or sales in your own software, and then quickly & easily use that data to generate invoices. It’ll be hard to get them wrong, as they’ll use real purchase data.
13. Competitors offering faster delivery/service
Sometimes, a good reason to digitalize your operations is simply to stay competitive. If you’re a well-established company, but others in your industry are doing a much better job with digitalization, you might consider the fact that you’re seriously missing out.
It’s an even bigger problem when digitalization is helping your competitors offer faster services. You’ll miss out on potential new customers and, thus, on revenue. By switching to a software-based system, you can manage customers, orders and stats much easier and at a glance.
14. Cross-department communication breakdowns
In a big team, it’s easy for information to get lost, confused, misunderstood, or outdated. Especially when it’s handled across different departments. And if you haven’t digitalized your business processes, chances are this information gets handled through various text messaging groups, emails, post its and even word of mouth.
When you digitalize your business operations, you get the chance to move all important communication in one spot. You can assign and notify people in charge, set alerts, and keep better track of notes and to do lists.
15. Unable to work remotely or hybridly
When most of your work is handled analog, you’re reliant on pen and paper - and physical presence. This restricts you to a certain location, to employees who live nearby, and to a very specific (or better said, generic) schedule.
By digitalizing your operations, you allow your team to take their work outside of the office. You can hire people from other cities or countries and you can help your domestic team have a better work-life balance. And most of all, the time they’d spend commuting can be turned into working on important tasks and better focus.
16. Project delays from resource allocation conflicts
When moving your business operations to a digital space, either through your own, custom software or through a pre-existing CRM software, you can much more easily keep track of your activities and schedule.
You can create a space where your team marks which member is in charge of what project and for how long, so that when creating new projects you can’t assign team members who can’t help out.
Source: https://dribbble.com/shots/25322023-CRM-Dashboard
And it’s not just about human resources: you can use your internal software to track project status, so you can quickly see how busy your team is, and if they can take in additional tasks.
17. Lost documents or information requiring recreation
When using software to keep track of documents and information, it’s very hard to lose data. You’d have to be hacked, have no cybersecurity or be using unreliable storage systems. Which, if you hire the right software development team, you won’t have to worry about.
But when staying analog, it’s easy to lose important documents or data. You can forget how you stored them, lose files when moving offices, accidentally throw away post its with important ideas, or former team members could take valuable information with them as they leave, if they only made handwritten notes.
18. Quarterly closes taking 2+ weeks
When so much of your activity is analog, your go-to method of creating financial reports is by creating lots of stuffy Excel spreadsheets. You’d take a very long time gathering data, sorting through it and figuring out formulas.
But when you keep track of all your business finances within your own internal software or CRM tool, not only you’ve got all important financial reports at a glance, but you can also quickly export all essential data - all in a few minutes.
19. Customer data scattered across multiple tools
Do you keep customer data in random spreadsheets or worse, in physical binders? What happens when a customer asks you to remove their data, or update their personal information?
This can’t be an issue when you rely on software - especially a CRM. It’s a much more efficient way to keep track of customer data, to search through it, analyze it, and update it as needed.
20. Missed opportunities due to delayed insights
When you’ve got no useful analytics about your business activity, you can’t leverage opportunities to reach new customers, markets or expansion possibilities. You can’t see what’s performing well, spiking, creating buzz - nor what’s not sitting right with customers.
When digitalizing your operations, your activity can be easily tracked by your own software. All your valuable data stays with you, and your team can analyze it and find business opportunities much faster.
Do you suffer from any of the issues on this list? Well, our company builds software for a living. And for many years, we’ve been making complex software that helps businesses improve their process. Let’s have a chat and see how we can help your business digitalize its operations.
