Stop Whining and Start Winning: The Secret To

Automating Your Important IT Business Processes

A IT owners guide to finding business success through your automating your most

important processes

A Publication By:

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

You Can’t Grow Your IT Business with Manual Processes pg 3

Automate Workflows to Save Money, Time, and Grow

Your Business pg 5

The Case for Business Intelligence pg 7

Improve Your Inventory Management pg 9

Streamline Your Marketing Campaigns pg 10

Automate Your Payment Processes pg 12

CHECKLIST: What to Look for in Business Process Automation pg 14

Our Story – Tigerpaw pg 15

Our Story – BNG Holdings pg 19

Introduction

You Can’t Grow Your IT Business with Manual Processes

Just because you’re a small IT service provider, that doesn’t mean you have do things the hard way – doing everything yourself and handling your business processes manually.

Just because you’re a small business

doesn’t mean you have to do it all yourself.

In operating your IT business are you:

•Tracking time, service requests, accounts receivable, or anything else,

by spreadsheet

•Printing and mailing, or even emailing, invoices

•Accepting payments over the phone

•Using a separate software for every business process

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If so, you’re juggling too much on your own. Manual business processes don’t save you time, and they could be costing you money. One of these days, you’re going to drop the ball.

With the technology available today, there is simply no good reason to work more hours than you need to on

business functions that could easily be automated.

Getting your businesses processes organized and automated is an essential step if you want your business to grow without killing yourself in the process.

Finding a solution to help manage your business tasks doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated. There are solutions out there to suit any size company.

If you think the solutions available are too expensive, think about what it’s really costing you to manage your business using your current methods.

When you find the right partners with the right tools, it can be easy and even- dare we say it - fun.

As a first step on the path towards total business automation, we’ve put together this simple guide to help you find the right solution for your business.

You Can’t Grow Your IT Business with Manual Processes

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Many IT service providers try to handle whatever they can on their own, using the most basic of business tools. Organizing information by spreadsheet and processing payments manually, and there’s nothing wrong with that; if you’re just starting out.

However, if you want to successfully grow your business, you will eventually have to put some automated systems in place if you want to maximize your time and keep the cash rolling in.

There are many ways that automation

can help you grow your business, including:

• Winning new clients

• Improving customer service

• Reducing costs

• Improving operational efficiencies

When your business processes are automated, you can go home at the end of the day with peace of mind, knowing that nothing has fallen through the cracks.

Automate Your Workflows to Save Money, Time, and Grow Your Business

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What else can automation do for you?

• Increase your revenue without adding staff

• Decrease billing time with automated payment processing

• Close more sales opportunities with targeted marketing campaigns

• Improve profitability

• Boost tech utilization and billable hours

What kind of solution should you look for?

For the best experience, you’ll want to look for a solution that combines everything your business needs – from contact management, sales and service management to inventory management and payment processing –into a single system that makes you more successful.

With the right solution in place, you’ll find that you’ve not only automated your business, but you’ve also

simplified your life.

Automate Your Workflows to Save Money, Time, and Grow Your Business

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The best business management software will provide the information you need to successfully grow your business.

For example, Tigerpaw Software has a business intelligence tool called the Matrix. It is a large database that serves up the information you need easily and securely.

The Case For Business Intelligence

What is business intelligence?

“Getting the right information to the right people at the right time so they can make the right decision.”

James Foxall – CEO of Tigerpaw Software

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For example, if you’re the owner of an ITSP, you may want to run a profits and loss report for the day; a utilization report to track what’s happening in the service division, as well as a forecast to track quotes and sales that are projected to close in the next few days.

With a business intelligence tool like the Matrix, you can run those reports quickly and easily through a single dashboard. All the information you need is at your fingertips, and you have the ability to quickly drill down to the department or even employee level.

If you want your ITSP to grow, this is the information you need to make the right decisions for your business. The key is to find a business management tool that offers you robust reporting. Tigerpaw’s Matrix is one of the few solutions out there that provides easy access to information in a simple report using real time data.

The Case For Business Intelligence

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Inventory management has become more complex for managed service providers, making it important to seek out a more sophisticated solution.

Today, more and more MSPs track assets through the hardware as a service.

If you already provide this type of service, or are currently considering it, you need a more sophisticated level of inventory management in order to accurately track and bill for this service.

To accurately track this type of inventory, you need to make sure the PSA software you choose is able to manage your assets by tracking serial numbers all the way down to the business location, or the asset location.

Without a sophisticated inventory management tool, you will be spending a lot of time tracking assets manually, making it more likely that you will experience costly billing errors.

Do the inventory management solutions you’re considering have this capability? (Most don’t.) If the answer is ‘no’, you may want to consider Tigerpaw Software, which has one of the most sophisticated inventory management tools on the market.

Improve Your Inventory Management

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PSAs are wonderful tools for managing many of your business processes, but if you’re ready to take things up a notch, you’ll want a tool that also helps you manage your marketing campaigns.

This is a capability that few PSAs include in their base solution, which means you’ll need to purchase separate marketing software – one that may not integrate well with your PSA and other programs.

The downside of adding on a third-party marketing tool, is that you now have another system to learn, and one more place where you’ll have to manually enter your customer’s contact information.

Streamline Your Marketing Campaigns

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It’s much easier if your PSA already has a robust marketing tool included –one that has the ability to track all of your customer contacts so that you can deliver email blasts with your marketing campaigns, or email newsletters right out of your PSA, without having to add on a third-party marketing tool

When you have a PSA with integrated marketing capabilities, your sales person can long in, look at a particular customer or specific contact, and know exactly what campaign went to each of them.

You’ll also want to be able measure the effectiveness of your message by making sure your software provides you with analytics that will show you open rates, click-throughs and bounce back statistics.

With a comprehensive solution like Tigerpaw Software, you can enter your client’s contact information one time and be able to use it throughout all of your business processes – from inventory management, to billing, to marketing. Simple, fast, and cost-effective.

Streamline Your Marketing Campaigns

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If you’re wasting a lot of time reentering data into your accounting software, you need a payment processing solution that integrates with top accounting packages.

The entire payment process can be automated when you have a solution that allows you to set your customers up onetime payment up with recurring agreement. Contracts that include auto-pay, and have payments automatically deposited into your business account each month. It’s the fastest and easiest way to make sure you get paid on time, every time for recurring customer agreements.

You want a payment processing solution to first and foremost provide multiple convenient ways for your IT customers to pay. You’ll also want it to integrate easily to your accounting and other software so that paying by ACH or E-check is as easy as paying by credit card.

Automate Your Payment Process

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It’s also important that your PSA solution integrates with QuickBooks, Peachtree and other top accounting programs so that you will be able to batch contacts, accounts receivables, payments purchase orders, and general ledger data.

Without this integration, you will still have to manually reconcile payments inside of your accounting software – a huge waste of time that can be easily eliminated with the right payment processing solution.

Finally, you want a payment processing solution that is secure. When you’re accepting customer payments by phone, or storing them on your internal company database, you are placing your customers and your company at risk.

If you’re concerned about the security of customer information (as you should be), you want to make sure the payment processing solution you choose takes care of that. The solution you choose should be PCI compliant and store your customer’s private information outside of your internal database, where it’s more secure.

Automate Your Payment Process

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When you are evaluating possible process automation solutions for your business, look for a solution that has the ability to grow with you, as you grow your business.

Look for a solution that will:

☐ Integrate fully with your accounting program and other business software

☐ Secure your customers private information

☐ Integrate with an autopay solution to allow your customers to pay online 24/7

☐ Allow you to automatically process monthly recurring payments

☐ Have the ability to manage your marketing campaigns

☐ Have an easy to use, fully supported (and ideally free) implementation process

☐ Provide top-level support

☐ Include mobile capabilities that allow your team to use the software remotely

☐ Be flexible enough to automate the specific business processes your company needs

CHECKLIST: What to Look for in Business Process Automation

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Tigerpaw Software is the leader in full business process automation for technology companies with 10 or more

employees.

Founded in 1984, Tigerpaw Software remains firmly on the cutting edge of business software development with an ever-expanding set of field service

management. With professional services tools that allow their clients to sell more, service better, and grow.

40,000 users, one business solution.

For more than 30 years, the Tigerpaw Software Suite has empowered more than 40,000 users worldwide to better manage customers, increase revenue and integrate business functions. Leading the charge, it is the only end-to-

end solution tying all aspects of your business into a robust, single application.

Our Story-Tigerpaw Software

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Tigerpaw Software Benefits

Many technology solution providers are working with several different systems to store and process their customer data. They might be using

Outlook to handle contact management, and an in-house solution to handle support tickets. This requires entering the same data several times into

different systems – adding up to hours of manual work in order to generate reports.

All-in-one solutionTigerpaw Software helps ITSPs consolidate these silos of client information, manage marketing efforts, and integrate with major accounting programs to facilitate invoice and payment processing – all in one application. Tigerpaw

Software eliminates the need for multiple tools by meeting a variety of business needs in one solution.

Works with your business toolsTigerpaw Software is so much more than a PSA; it’s CRM, inventory

management, service ticket management and payment processing all rolled into one. Tigerpaw Software also has more than 250 go-to-market and

integration partners. It is an open platform and open API, which allows customers to add-on the tools they want to use to run their business.

Our Story-Tigerpaw Software

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Advanced mobile capabilityTigerpaw Software has also developed an industry leading mobile tool. It is

the only platform that currently allows users to log in remotely using a hand-held device to access admin usernames and passwords.

No-cost implementation and ongoing supportTigerpaw Software customers are not charged for implementation and

receive full customer support that is available to anyone who is using the software.

Our Story-Tigerpaw Software

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“Before Tigerpaw Software, we were using 3 or 4 different, disparate systems to track our work, track our time and track our expenses. We really didn’t have any linkage between them where we could look at things from a top level to really understand profitability and efficiencies.”Rick Harber CEO, Decision Digital Inc.

What are Tigerpaw SoftwareCustomers Saying?

“As we’ve grown, Tigerpaw Software has always met the challenge and I can’t imagine working without it now. We’re able to put in our data very quickly and easily. It’s an amazing value, and most importantly, it helps put all of the data about our clients and our jobs in one place.”Ann JohnsonCFO, Premier Systems

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BNG Holdings, Inc. is a leader in payment processing technology and CRM payment integrations. Tigerpaw Software, chose BNG as their preferred payments partner because BNG’s level of service, competitive pricing, powerful security features and expertise are worlds apart from other merchant service providers. There are no setup fees or long-term contracts, and the sign up process takes less than 45 minutes.

BNG is a payment processing company specific to the IT community. Having worked with more than 500 IT companies over the past five years, BNG understands the needs of IT companies. BNG is your partner in processing payments. When you sign up with us, that’s not the end of our job, that’s the beginning of our relationship.

With BNG Payments Gateway, your IT customers can pay their bills online, anytime using the payment method they prefer. They can log in to their customer portal and make a single payment, or schedule future payments. You can also set customers up with autopay to have their recurring monthly payments transferred directly into your account.

Our Story-BNG

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Secure your customer data

BNG’s Payment Gateway goes beyond PCI compliance – storing your client’s sensitive credit card and ACH data on BNG’s PCI DSS compliant payment gateway servicers, instead of your Tigerpaw Software database. BNG’s customer vault feature uses propriety encryption and tokenization technology so that all sensitive card data is stored securely and does not touch your network.

Accept mobile payments

When combined with Tigerpaw Software, BNG Payment Gateway can accept payments from your IT clients out in the field through a mobile device. With the help of geolocation tracking, you can see exactly where the transaction is being run and tie it to an invoice number. Your IT customer will sign on the screen of your mobile device, and that signature will be stored in the BNG Gateway. Mobile payments can also be integrated into your accounting software with the addition of a QuickBooks plug.

Our Story-BNG

BNG Benefits

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Reduce Fees

BNG saves Tiger Paw customers money on their current rates. On average, most Tigerpaw Software customers save ½ a percent per transaction from what they were paying before.

Automate Recurring Billing

The BNG Payment Gateway has a very robust, easy-to-use recurring billing features. IT will allow you to bill a customer a specified dollar amount on a specific day for a particular period of time, or indefinitely.

Get paid online, anytime

By using BNG technology to process payments, your customers can log online, view payments and make payments anytime, anywhere. They can pay by check online, or by credit card, even late at night. They can set up automatic payment for managed services.

Bottom line – If you’re a tech company, you should be using technology to make it easier for your IT firm to

collect what is owed you.

Our Story-BNG

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BNG Holdings Inc. is the type of business partner that delivers. They understand that relationships begin with trust and are followed by delivering what you promise. What began as a meeting at a conference has turned into a rewarding partnership. Together, each of our firms has enabled the other to grow and take care of our most important asset: our customers.

”Rick Harber, Chief Problem Solver

Decision Digital

What are BNG Customers Saying?

“At Tigerpaw, we engaged BNG Holdings Inc., to be the sole payments processor for integration with our 40,000-user software suite. BNG has consistently delivered on every promise they’ve ever made, and they’ve worked to come up with solutions that benefit our company, and our mutual customers. BNG Holdings’ passion, as well as the passion of their CEO, are a force to be reckoned with, and they treat our customers with the same integrity and spirit of service as Tigerpaw Software does.

James Foxall, CEO Tigerpaw Software

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Want To Know More?

Now that you know how Tigerpaw Software and BNG’s Payment Gateway can help you save money, time, and grow your business,

it’s time to take the next step in automating your business and payment processes.

Learn more here

Learn more about Tigerpaw Software

Learn more about BNG Payment Gateway