hey it's patti scharf CPA and co-founder of catching clouds the leader in
e-commerce accounting welcome back to another Saturday slow down where I like
to remind everybody to work on their business and not just in their business
okay so a couple of weeks back I did a video where I was talking about like the
different things that we learned while we were on our five-month trip around
New Zealand and Australia and one of the things that we learned was that some of
the stuff in our company was kind of broken so one of the biggest issues we
found came around like standardization across the firm so forever we've been
looking for a project management solution and we've been using asana
which I talked about about eight months ago or so I did a YouTube video on that
you can see that here and as much as I love asana the problem with asana is
like the beauty of asana is is its flexibility but the horrible part about
asana is its flexibility so even though I could use it really effectively I
could create links in my asana tasks that went to like a Google Doc or
something that would help keep me on track and all of that
it didn't really scale through the company because every single person in
the company was using it in a different way some more effectively than others
and it didn't help promote standardization it actually promoted
doing things all kind of differently so that that was a big challenge so one of
the things that we had looked to for creating standardization across our
company was just having one source of the truth and what we are using for that
was teachable so teachable is really an online training tool it's a learning
management system and people would go through the training and then everybody
would know how we do things here but the problem is for that you watch it once
and then trying to remember where to go to to go find that information it was
just it was kind of a problem and and the other problem was the tasks itself
so what was living in asana was totally separate from the training which was in
teachable and yes you could create links and stuff to specific
tools or whatever but again our team just wasn't using it that way
consistently so one of the other things we did is we had a lot of our standard
operating procedures in Google Docs so the the good thing about Google Docs is
it's really quick and easy you can you figure out a new process for the first
time you document it it's accessible to everybody you can do a link from asana
to that you can attach that in teachable so on and so forth but the problem we
were running into the with that is because it was so easy
we might figure out a way to do something and then oh wait we've got a
better process great I'll create a process and then I'll create another
process and then so now we've got like 50 processes people are like doing a
search in Google Drive looking for the right Google Doc nobody knows which one
is the right one worse than that somebody's maybe using a
version from two iterations ago or something like that it was just a big
problem so we've been trying to look for a system that would kind of pull our
whole company together we've we've looked at different different tools out
there and the problem is a lot of them were based on time so a lot of
accounting firms what what you'll find is people are billing in six minute
increments or 15-minute increments and so everybody's having to keep track of
their time in association with the tasks and things like that
well our firm doesn't work that way we feel like we need to focus our time on
getting the best results for our clients so I don't care how much time we're
spending on something I care more about the fact that we're doing something of
value and we're focusing on the right tasks so we want a system that keeps
track of oh here are the ten things that need to get done to get to the end of
this project boom boom boom boom boom boom boom done versus okay and I'm
keeping track of six minutes for this and ten minutes for that and twelve
minutes for this it's and we just we had a very difficult time finding something
like that but yeah we so excited about it and I'm
so happy to share it with you today so the the tool that we found is called
processed Street let's pop over to process Street because I want to show
you basically how easy it is and some of the functionality that I really love
about it that I've grown to love over the last like two weeks that I've been
using it okay so so the first thing you need to know is there's a difference
between templates and checklists all of your standard operating procedures are
going to be created as templates this is basically a beginning to end process for
whatever it is you're doing it might be payroll it might be shipping products to
to your customers it might be onboarding a new employee whatever it is you have
your standard process beginning to end how you do things in your company okay
when you create that you're going to use the template okay
and in this template I'm going to go ahead and edit this on the left hand
side you have the list of all of the tasks all of the steps from A to Z of
how you get from here to the end of your process okay then for each and every
step you're going to basically put in all the information anybody would need
to know about that step so it might include context it might include
additional training it might include subtasks so in this case we've got some
subtasks that we created and basically we created it just by dragging and
dropping this section over here and then filling in the tasks okay and then we've
got this information here I've got heading here that you can totally format
and change to whatever size and shape and color you like and then you can
create some some language there you can pull it out some lists or whatever you
want to do okay so you may have additional
additional points here and here and here okay and then you can create like maybe
a hyperlink that's going to take you to outside training or whatever you can add
videos you can add screenshots so whatever images you want whatever so you
can customize this however you want to fit your needs
okay and then you just rinse and repeat for each of your different tasks it
takes no time at all look you can add video like this you click to upload the
photo or you would just put the link in there you can add text like this oops I
think this you can add a file or whatever you want to do okay then you
can save those changes and this is the really cool things about it so so you
have this template and then when you're going to use your standard operating
procedures you create a checklist off of that so every time you create a
checklist it's going to be those exact steps for the business just list it out
one by one and you just mark them as done as you go through that okay but
then let's say you've created this template you've created a bunch of
checklists and then you're like oh I missed a step in the middle you can go
back to your template edit it in the middle and then when you save it it's
gonna give you this question do you want to update your existing checklists and
if you say yes it's going to automatically update your checklists to
include the information that you've edited in your template or you can say
no no don't mess with the old stuff this is just going to be going forward and
then you can go edit your existing checklist one by one okay so I'm gonna
say sure cuz this is a test anyway so who cares
then when I go to overview this is a list of the checklists that are based on
this this template okay and if I were to go into one of these you can see the
changes that I made see that additional points and point point that all got
added to that so that's really really cool
so here's one of the other things that I really like about
about process Street so you can actually let's go to you can do it from here
so let's run a new checklist off of that template okay this is how we're gonna do
it this will now be test number three we run the the checklist and voila it just
exists okay and then we can mark the things done that we've done you can
assign it to your self or to somebody else you can in the template set due
dates so that you say every time a checklist is created I want step one to
be due the next day step two to be due eight hours after that step three to be
due a week after that so on and so forth so that it will automatically assign
things and date things based on how the template is set up or you can do that on
the fly you can override it on your checklists as you create them okay
here is one of the other super amazing things about process treat it integrates
with zapier and it integrates really really well so so if you want something
to happen outside of process Street when you mark off task number two so you say
oh task number two that's done you can create a zap and zap here if you don't
know it's a peers or what I'm talking about go watch this video because that's
going to tell you all about it but you can mark a task is done and when that's
marked is done you can have a zap created that will automatically
I don't know send an email to the customer that says hey your product has
been shipped and this product is ready to be delivered to you at this address
when I say this address I mean you can have it set up so that you've created
forms that come in from you've created form fields like name address phone
number email that's coming in from your CRM or
something like that so process Street can talk to other tools that you use
with zapier is kind of the glue between them so all of this is just music to my
ears because it means that I can create one standard source of truth for me and
my team everybody knows what what needs to be done to get from point A to point
C or Z or X or whatever for each of the different systems in our company and
then we can keep track of the status of them and see how things are coming so
that we know when we're hitting deadlines when we're missing deadlines
and we have the ability to create some automation in our in our systems where
we don't need humans doing things we can have our systems directly talking to
other systems and all of that is just great I am I'm loving processed Street
this is not a paid advertisement I just want to tell you about my experience and
yeah I hope that you guys check it out if you guys are using process Street
maybe share down below some of your favorite tips and tricks with it because
you know like I said I'm still kind of learning and and poking around in here
if you're not using process Street or you're using something else that you
think is amazing maybe leave some comments about those down below too so I
think that's it for today I hope you liked this video if you did please like
comment and share if you haven't already please subscribe and I'll catch you
later