bespoke web applications demystified

One of the fundamental principles of running any business is keeping a tight control on costs, and many are now embracing web applications to help them achieve this. However, many are still unclear as to what web applications are, and how they can benefit their business.

So, let us demystify them for you!

Essentially, a web application is a tool that will effectively create a system or process through automation which aims to save you time and money, as well as streamlining work that is repetitive.

A common misconception is that web applications perform administrative tasks, but this isn’t the case. They are much more than that. Any repetitive process in your business can probably be streamlined and simplified by a bespoke web application.

Here are some examples of how a web application can work:

Task	Without Web App	With Web App
Booking jobs	Monitoring lots of emails	Instantly booking onto one bespoke system
Registration for events/courses	Taking hundreds of phone calls	People register onto event themselves
Payment/Invoicing	Several trips to the bank to cash cheques	People paying automatically online

As creative designers for web, print and new media every single one of our projects can be justified in one of two ways:

1) Something that makes you money
2) Something that saves you money

The making money projects are obvious. If you buy a marketing website, run an email marketing campaign, take out some Google Adwords, or setup an e-commerce website, and it costs you £x, you spend that money in the hope that it makes you at least £x+1. That’s making money, and everyone understands it. Most (but not all) web applications do not fall into this category.

Most web applications fall into the other category of something that saves you money. That might seem counter-intuitive. How can spending money on something save you money? Picture this:

• You have a company secretary along with 20 other members of staff who you pay an annual salary to, and in return they give you 37-40 hours of their time each week.
• To make sure everyone is billing for all of their time, you ask them to keep spreadsheets of what they’re spending their time on.
• Your company secretary collates everyone’s spreadsheets into a nice big report, and they email you every month so you can see how much profit all of your employees are making you.
• You begin to notice that there are periods when none of your employees are doing any billable work, losing about 10 billable days a month to reporting, at an average salary of £25,000/year, that’s costing you about £1,000 every month, or £12,000 per year and that’s not counting the income lost by not being able to bill clients for those hours, which could be more than 5x as much.

It’s at this point that you should come to Image+. We can design an application, which will halve the time employees take in entering information on to their time sheets, automatically generating reports instead of taking up your secretary’s time, which, of course, will then free up even more of their time for other tasks.

Additionally, we can design the system to automatically email employees who are late filing their time-sheets, error-checking all submissions to make sure they’ve accounted for all of their time, and when it’s all done you will receive a copy of the report by email.

But this bespoke stuff is always expensive, right? Well, expense is relative. Here is an example of how it could work:

• Cost of system = £10,000
• Freeing employees time for billable work worth = £60,000
• Time to make investment back = 2 months
• Profit in first year = £50,000
• Profit every following year – £60,000

The possibilities for bespoke apps are endless, and almost all businesses can save money with a web application, so why not contact us for an informal chat and tell us which parts of your job are boring, repetitive, or just costing you too much money, and see how we can help.