San Francisco, October 15th: Brightpearl, the commerce acceleration platform, today highlighted the growing risk of smaller businesses relying on technologies to manage their back office that are often not fit for purpose or duplicate tasks. In speaking to its customers and prospects, Brightpearl uncovered an alarming trend of either outdated technologies or ones that are being asked to perform tasks beyond their design.

Another particularly common trend pointed to entry level accounting systems being used for inventory control and even CRM, leading to frequently poor visibility of stock and very poor, untimely or misdirected customer communications. Too often businesses are relying on spreadsheets and other non-automated tools to perform business critical tasks, which can have a severe impact on the business either in terms of time or lost sales.

“In the current economic climate, it’s vital that businesses are utilising all their resources as efficiently as possible. Often smaller businesses can find that large amounts of man-hours are spent on admin related tasks due to a lack of investment in IT to replace outmoded or mis-used applications,” says Salman Malik, CEO, Brightpearl. “The reality is, this approach is putting smaller businesses at unnecessary risk and is avoidable when there are technologies available designed specifically for them.”

As a result of its extensive interviews with customers in the United States and United Kingdom, the following common themes emerged:

a reliance on single function accounting systems to manage all contacts records

no connection between systems involved in the order fulfilment process

no central repository of data for products, customers or suppliers

non-integrated ecommerce sites causing frequent double selling of items

hours of manual data entry to key in order, customer details or the production of invoices

spreadsheets used in lieu of any integrated customer management system

contact databases relying on discontinued operating systems with no migration plan

Brightpearl will launch an education programme in November aimed at helping retailers to uncover where a consolidated IT approach can help them to achieve efficiencies  in their businesses based on the real world experiences in its customer base.

Brightpearl is available from $99/£69 per user per month.