Pal 9000 What Do You Want to Automate Today?

• Author: Gilmore, Trevor
• Position: Tech Talk

While attending the Code c: Conference in Las Vegas in 2014, Marc Benioff famously said, "I run my business entirely on my phone.'' The cloud, even then, was powerful enough for the Salcsforce CEO to run a global organization on his phone.

For all the hype and fear about automation, it's always been amongst us. Excel, which was born in 1985 and qualifies as a millennial, is the poster child of modern financial modeling. It's still the gold standard for finance, although new cloud rivals such as Airlable are combining spreadsheet features with database capabilities.

When shopping for new software, my criteria is--of course--ROI, from a qualitative and quantitative perspective. What is the payback period? Will this allow our firm to spend our time pursuing more fruitful endeavors? One measure of ROI is the ability to be productive anywhere in the world. I think everyone should be able to run their business from their phone, just like Beniolf.

Here are some free--or nearly free - tools that will do the trick.

1. Automate Your Rote Tasks With Zapier

   When visiting Zapier's website (zapier.com), you're asked the question "What Do You Want to Automate Today?" Hmm, where do I start?

   Zapier is a nifty tool that integrates with a multitude of apps and cloud-based software; plans are free or $20 per month. Content is king these days, so do you want a connection between your WordPrcss blog and your Linkedln account? Zapier has an integration for that. Want a new Airtable record anytime you create a new Slack channel? Zapier can do that, too.

   We use Zapier's new DocuSign integration tool for QuickBooks Online. which automatically creates a retainer invoice once a DocuSign engagement proposal is signed. All this can be done on a mobile phone. Nifty!

2. Automate Expense Reports With Tallie

   Tallie (usetallie.com) is an easy-to-use, expense reporting app that connects directly to your credit card of choice and integrates with most of the popular online accounting platforms, such as Intaact, NetSuite, QuickBooks and Xero.

   Users open the app on their smartphone or computer, snap a photo of their receipt and Tallie's optical character recognition technology reads the merchant, receipt amount and makes an educated guess at expense categorization based on the merchant. The software is not always 100 percent accurate, but easy to correct when submitting your expenses.

   By removing a layer of manual data entry, we immediately realized savings. In the past, staff...