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Operating a business can be extremely challenging, especially in terms of logistics. However, these days becoming an entrepreneur is not so hard. With the advancement of technology, it is difficult to put in your time, money, and energy in what seems like a blink of an eye.Most important of all, one needs to know what helps in simplifying the overall operational processes of a business. The best business owners know that there are several helpful software tools to make our lives much easier and help to improve the efficiency of the business.The use of these essential tools can give you a better understanding of the various business activities, and documentation and thereby ease the burden of managing the business. The following are the 8 essential pieces of software that can help in running your business efficiently:

• Enterprise Risk Management
• Social Media Management
• Email Marketing
• Content Management System
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• Project Management
• Accounting Software
• Meeting / Scheduling Calendar Software

Table of Contents

1.) Enterprise Risk Management (ERM)

Enterprise risk management software (also known as ERM software) is a type of risk management software designed to assist large businesses in identifying possible risks and weighing them against future opportunities.ERM Software has several features that help in forecasting based on risk analysis. It is critical to identify the potential costs associated with various risks throughout the lifecycle of your firm and anticipate the worst situations. Management of incident response by creating and implementing plans is necessary to reduce the impact of events such as power outages, cyber-attacks, and supply shortages, among others.  In order to develop strategies for organizations to address enterprise risk management, governance and compliance, GRC frameworks are essential. With a flexible, configurable, and integrated GRC software solution, you can quickly identify and mitigate risk and ensure compliance. 

2.) Social Media Management:

Social media management is the practice that enables the implementation of your digital marketing and social media campaigns. It is a critical aspect of executing a successful social media strategy as it will determine the extent to which your company will participate in terms of customer engagement, creating content and so on.

3.) Email Marketing:

The email marketing platform allows you to build a closer relationship with your customers. One of the best email marketing tools, “Mailchimp” assists right from the creation of a website to scheduling social media posts, preparing email newsletters and so on. Mailchimp plays a crucial role in generating leads, raising brand awareness, and attracting potential customers.

4.) Content Management System:

Many companies use content management system software to monitor their digital data. The CMS software helps to collaborate, organise documents, publish online content and helps to make modifications to digital content on websites. A couple of CMS software that is used most commonly are WordPress, Wix and Weebly. One of the best CMS platforms WordPress helps to create, alter, and maintain websites and user-friendly tools.

5.) Customer Relationship Management Software:

Customer Relationship Management is important as it gathers, plans, and manages all your customer-related information. It will help you to improve your level of communication with these consumers, improve customer service, and manage data across your marketing, sales, and customer teams. 

6.) Project Management Software:

The best project management software can be your company’s most valuable logical asset. Project Management software can be used to share different ideas. This kind of software enables users to easily manage big projects by splitting them into individual job tasks by maintaining a holistic view of the project. For instance, software like MS Office 365 and Trello helps to split the organisation into tiny chunks that would enable you to enhance your business efficiency by simplifying complex tasks.

7.) Accounting Software:

Every day, businesses need to carry out several transactions on a regular basis. It is crucial to keep track of their cash flow, costs, savings, and tax filing to keep the business intact. Accounting is one of the most important parts of a business or organisation. For this, we need to choose the right accounting software for your organization’s needs. Nonetheless, there is plenty of accounting software that can fulfil the requirements of a business.Accuracy of your books and keeping them up to date is important.  For instance, there are much easy-to-use accounting software such as Zoho, Quick books and Tally streamlined for the smooth functioning of businesses. Proper invoicing plays a vital role in the company’s growth.

8.) Calendar Or Meeting Scheduling Software:

Calendar or Meeting software can help companies in planning and scheduling, meetings, presentations, appointments, and events and make sure that all the tasks are completed within the stipulated time.  Having a meeting scheduling software or calendar can improve time management and help you to prioritise your daily tasks.  Scheduling software will increase the efficiency of the business by regularly monitoring the overall business workflow. Tasks can be easily assigned to employees with the help of a scheduling system, and this would encourage a more collaborative work environment. 

Wrap Up:

Industry-specific requirements should be considered while choosing a business software. The requirement of your software depends on the kind of business that you are dealing with. Business management becomes much easier and more fruitful with efficient software in place. This will also promote better workflow. When selecting a business software, industry-specific requirements must be considered. Your software requirements will be influenced by the products and services offered by your organisation.To summarise, essential software tools increase productivity allowing automated workflows, increased employee efficiency, improved business communication, a better grasp of business operations and data, and much more. 

Internal Audit refers to a department within an organisation who are assigned the task of providing an unbiased, independent feedback of the systems, organisations, and procedures. An organisation’s management or governing bodies look at Internal Audit to serve as an objective source of information about the organisation’s risks, control environment, operational effectiveness, and compliance to all the standards and framework.It is the responsibility of an organisation’s internal audit to give independent assurance that the risk management, governance, and internal control procedures are functioning effectively. The internal audit management software assists you in managing all your audit projects and conduct all your risk analysis under a single platform. The internal audit management software allows you to keep track of all your risk initiatives and carry out all your risk assessments using one single platform. It enhances the project’s agility and value by working together in a single location on all aspects of auditing, including planning, fieldwork, and report writing.The isorobot internal audit management software gives you real-time visibility into the status of your audit plan, reporting issues, and the status of your corrective action plan. To effectively assess risk assessment and eliminate non-conformances, an effective risk assessment approach includes risk assessment, audit, corrective action plan, and closure audit.

Internal Audit Manager

Internal Audit manager solution is in direct conflict with the organisation’s goals and objectives. The Internal Audit Manager examines the guidelines, business frameworks, and ISO standards, in addition to the best practices that are currently included within the best practices library.

The Internal Audit Process

Internal Audit comprises of four stages namely planning, conducting the audit, analysing the results, and following up:

• Planning

During the process of planning, the internal audit team will define the scope and objectives, review guidance specific to audit regulatory standards, policies, and procedures, review the results from previous audits, set a timeline, create an audit plan to be executed, identify the process owners to involve. The audit team will carry out an audit plan throughout this phase.

• Fieldwork

Fieldwork refers to the actual act of conducting an audit. Throughout this stage, the audit team will be implementing the audit plan. This typically entails interviewing key personnel to verify their familiarity with the process and controls, reviewing supporting documentation and artefacts to determine how the controls might be implemented in practice, testing a representative sample of the controls over time, documenting the results, and highlighting any discrepancies or areas for improvement.

• Reporting

During the reporting phase, internal audit management software will be responsible for drafting the audit report. Once the report is ready, the findings should be accompanied by recommendations or feedback that contribute to improve the entire internal auditing process. The process of issuing an internal audit report should include the following steps: drafting the report, reviewing the draught with management to ensure that the findings are accurate, issuing and distributing the final report, and closing out the process.

• Follow-up

Follow-up is the final stage that is usually disregarded and ignored. Conducting a follow-up is crucial to confirm that the recommendations have been put into action to address the findings that were discovered. This process ought to incorporate the necessary follow-up with process owners who are obligated to put the recommendations into action.

What is an Auditee’s Approach to Follow-up and how are Corrective Actions Verified to Ensure Continuous Improvement?

• The Auditor can perform a root-cause analysis, impact analysis and based on this, corrective actions can be taken through the system
• The auditors have the ability to record their findings
• Taking the necessary steps to close out corrective actions is highly critical. Failing to do so will render the entire audit and its results meaningless
• The isorobot internal audit management system will notify the responsible users on the deadline about remedial actions
• If the corrective actions are not closed within the stipulate period, this will be automatically escalated to the higher authorities
• The findings register live status will be useful to auditors as they can see all open findings
• Corrective actions with live status will be beneficial to auditors as they can see the status of corrective actions instead of always waiting for the auditee’s response
• Auditors will be able to follow up through the system
• Advanced dashboards and reports will give auditors and top management insights about findings and corrective actions

isorobot streamlines all the business processes and internal controls with the help of Internal Audit Manager. Therefore, under any circumstances, the advantages of conducting a follow-up using an isorobot internal audit software should never be under-valued. It is a crucial component of an ongoing audit programme and contributes to the process of ensuring that management has taken the proper corrective action. Hence, in the event that problems are not addressed and resolved, the organisation will still become vulnerable as before. Undoubtedly, follow-up audit continues to be an important weapon in the arsenal of the internal audit management programme.