Some entrepreneurs believe that small businesses can be run the old-fashioned way with paperwork, physical meetings, and coming up with ideas on an interactive whiteboard. They don’t even think about the possibility of owning a board portal. This article will outline the benefits of using this paperless meeting solution in a small business.
What is the Board Portal at all
The original purpose of the Board Portal is to help the executive team of a company gets their work done more efficiently. But the main ones are:
- Automating paperwork into digitalization. The main functions of all Board portal software are document management, digitization, electronic signatures, and various other interactions between the staff member and the documents.
- Virtual collaborations. Quick or scheduled meetings. Among the features are either simple video conferencing or advanced video conferencing with various additional features.
- Agenda building. Basically, all Board Portals offer ready-made templates, but you can create an agenda from scratch.
- Discussion Assistant. You can use this tool to keep track of any changes to scheduled tasks, you can share files, and you can reduce the use of slow email as a thing.
- Polls. It is an integral part of any management process when several participants are involved in it. The Board Portal allows you to create high-impact surveys to choose the most effective solution.
In any case, developers are constantly adding new or completely unexpected features to existing ones. It is up to everyone to choose whether or not to use them in the workflow.
Why is it good for small businesses?
While for large corporations, board management software is necessary for the convenience and automation of a few dozen departments, for small businesses it is necessary because of the time cost. In a world of constant competition, it is the small businesses that suffer from the constant struggle for a place under the sun. And in this struggle, one of the main criteria is the speed of decision-making.
You’ll be surprised how quickly your business will grow after you automate management processes:
- No long waits with paperwork;
- No long meetings;
- The use of email in the corporate network is reduced to a minimum;
- The data inside the Virtual board software is protected by advanced encryption.
Competition is won by the one who adapts best. Obviously, paperwork and other slowdowns are the factors that pull the whole business down.
How expensive is that
There are a huge number of Virtual boardroom developers today who offer a variety of subscription plans. Including some that are completely free. Their functionality is reduced, but it’s a good start. Most of the developers offer a demo version.
There is a temporary free version with full functionality that is provided to learn about the product. There you can try inside the company for a trial period to get acquainted with all the features. Usually, the demo versions also have 24-hour technical support.
The price for a whole product varies. For a small business, free options or cheap ones will do. Expensive options are required for big companies that have many departments with a huge number of employees, tasks, and data.
For example, Wrike is suitable for small businesses as it provides such features for free:
- Web, desktop, and mobile apps
- Personalized application interface due to AI-enabled operational analytics
- Managing tasks and subtasks
- Real-time news feed at both the global and project and task levels
- Internal and external guest users
- Interactive panels and tables
- Work schedules for the whole account
- Integration with cloud storage (Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, MSFT Office 365, and OneDrive)
- There is a limited number of active tasks
- 2 GB for the entire account
- An online board meeting is also available
A free account for start-up businesses and small businesses should be enough to get you started. When your business expands, you can think about buying any Board Portal professional plan on the market.
Using the same Wrike as an example, let’s look at the features they provide for the PRO account which costs $9.80 per month (not including those already listed):
- Common task bars
- Interactive Gantt charts
- Productivity integration capabilities (MS Project, Excel, RSS)
- 1 to 2 GB per user
The higher the price, the more features.
Summary
In fact, a lot more depends on the type of your business and the management style of your business. And even if you own a small business, but it is in the IT field, then you need a lot more features and a free plan of notional Wrike most likely will not suit you, you have to look for something more functional like Diligent or Boardable. The fact is that workflow optimization is the impetus for business growth. You just need to find the right one.
