Tech Innovations can Elevate MSMEs Presence Online

In today’s connected era, more and more businesses are taking their businesses online and this is the need for MSMEs today. It gives them greater access to customers, easier ways to conduct financial transaction, greater opportunities to collaborate with other businesses, and increase productivity, among others. Different people use different types of technology, and each has a certain experience of doing business online. However, it is critical to ensure that the experience can be made significantly more delightful and seamless, so it is of great benefit to the business.

Single Source of Truth - MSMEs receive orders from different channels. In addition to orders or purchase requests placed physically, orders come via multiple channels like email, WhatsApp messages, own website, marketplaces etc. Each business has their own way of dealing with integrating multi-channel order and processing them. A software-driven operation to integrate these orders into a single system, can be a truly delightful experience. The software integrates the orders from multiple sources into a single database. The use of technology can significantly simplify the business operations. Another example of this will be that of inventory. The merchant sells via multiple channels, including the physical store, multiple marketplaces etc. Their software needs to provide a unified view of real-time inventory, so that the merchant is able to provide better fulfillment experiences.

Reconcile with 3^rd Party Systems - Online transactions have gained momentum in the recent past and there are several use cases of it in MSMEs - sending payment transactions to banks and receiving account statements, uploading sales invoices to GST portal and receiving invoices uploaded by the vendors and so on. These types of online integrations smoothen day-to-day operations significantly. The business software should enable sending and receiving data with these entities at the click of a button. However, it is a given that different 3^rd party systems are designed differently, with different ways for authentication, different formats, and protocols for data exchange and so on, the software should be designed to deal with these complexities and simplify the steps for integration. Also, what makes a significant shift in experience is not just the ability to share transactions, but the ability of the business data to stay reconciled with key 3^rd party systems. The software should be designed so that the data stays reconciled to the transactions you made in your bank account, and stays reconciled to the transactions at the online marketplaces that you transact with. Many businesses spend considerable effort today in complex reconciliation activities, which is a must for the business. This can be significantly simplified by using the right software.

Collaborating with Other Business Entities - Collaborating online with other vendors, customers, distributors etc. enables the MSMEs to truly leverage the power of the connected world. Companies use various technical means like email, WhatsApp, Google Drive, drop box to exchange relevant data with other businesses. There are two ways we can look at this:

• A business shares data with external accountants for taxation and book building purposes, creating two copies of the same data, one with the business and the other with the accountant. Either copy may now go through some modification. Hence, there is need for technology to enable some synchronization between these two copies of data, which are residing in premises of different business entities. This is done today by exchanging multiple emails, WhatsApp messages etc. Technology can play a significant role in simplifying this method and make the synchronization seamless. These changes to data can just flow from one to the other, over the internet. Sync’ing could now be an automated process, or a one-step acceptance process to the data that has flown.
• MSMEs raise a purchase order with other businesses. Today, the order data flows via email/WhatsApp to the other side, and negotiations and corrections also flow by the same means. One can imagine a situation, in which once the purchase order is raised, it flows through the cloud to the other business and become a sales order. The data requires certain transformation before it can reside into the database of the receiving party, i.e., the party on which the purchase order is raised. The business software can provide the technology to operate across a network of businesses consisting of suppliers, customers, distributors etc. It can significantly automate how such data is exchanged among the business’s own network, thus, eliminating the need for repeated manual activities.

While MSMEs are increasingly adopting technology to leverage the connected world, business software makers have the opportunity to solve several technology aspects, thereby providing the businesses with a much more delightful experience. This will enable businesses to have a significantly elevated experience of being online.

--By Nabendu Das, Head of Engineering, Tally Solutions

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