A booking app, a quoting tool, two calendars, an email marketing service, a CRM nobody updates and three file-sharing accounts. Small businesses rarely plan their software. They add a tool each time a problem appears, and the monthly bill grows quietly.
Buying technology is not the hard part. BDC found that 91% of Canadian small and medium-sized businesses invested in technology in 2021, yet only about 1 in 20 used digital technologies effectively. Cost was the top barrier to going digital, named by 42%, and integration by 27%.
What overlap looks like by industry
- Real estate team: a brokerage CRM, a personal CRM, a separate email tool and contacts still in each agent’s phone.
- Restaurant: a POS, two delivery platforms, a reservation system and a separate scheduling app, none sharing data.
- Clinic or dental office: practice software with built-in reminders, plus a second paid reminder service nobody cancelled.
- Tax or consulting firm: documents across email, a shared drive and a portal, with a separate e-signature tool the suite already includes.
Step 1: List every tool and what it costs
Go through your bank and card statements for the last three months. Write down every subscription, its monthly cost, who uses it and what job it does.
Step 2: Group tools by job and find the overlap
Communication, scheduling, quoting and invoicing, customer records, marketing, files. Any job with two or more tools is a candidate to consolidate. Check what the suites you already pay for, such as Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, already cover.
Step 3: Ask where data is re-entered
Ask each person on the team what they copy from one system into another. Each answer is time lost and a place where errors start.
Step 4: Keep, merge or cancel
Decide for each tool. Move data before cancelling anything, and set a date to check that nothing broke.
How WIZAD can help: we run the software review with you, recommend what to keep, merge or cancel, and move your data safely to a simpler set of tools.
Source: BDC, Seize the Technological Advantage (May 2022, survey of more than 1,500 SMEs).
