While many fear digital automation, more software arrives every day that saves business owners a great deal of money year by lowering costs and increasing productivity and efficiency.

Let's look at a few business-related areas in which digital automation can help make your life easier.

Recruitment
Need to hire staff? Predictive analytics is transforming recruitment.

Predictive analytics is deriving business insights from data to uncover patterns and illustrate potential outcomes, and it can tell you how well your efforts are resonating with your desired candidates.

A variety of platforms, including LinkedIn, leverage data mining and digital automation to show the number of candidates in a specialty and/or geographic area based on the number of job listings in each city.

Unconscious bias is a huge problem in recruiting that keeps business owners up at night. If often keeps us from seeing recruits' true abilities and negatively affects hiring for diversity.

Consider exploring software that use “augmented writing" to allow owners to phrase job descriptions with neutral language, and, using digital automation, removes names from resumes so evaluators don't make assumptions about gender, race or ethnicity.

Paperwork
Most business owners are still mired in paperwork. And when you rely on paperwork, you risk misplacing important documents.

Consider giving each of these tools a trial period, see what works for your business and integrates well with your other systems and revise your approach as needed.

In the era of digital automation, you can leverage applications to simplify note-taking and document storage. There are digital note-taking tools that can help save your ideas, snippets you hear and things you see throughout the day as clipped notes. Some can also scan your paperwork papers directly to the cloud and/or your mobile device and computer of choice. If you're worried about security, some even has encryption features for sensitive documents.

As for all those business cards you constantly have in your briefcase or jacket pocket, try address book management app. These can help manage your address book so you're alerted when people change jobs or roles.

Management
How much time do you spend allocating resources and staffing your operations?  There are task management that offer digital automation to facilitate project monitoring and progress reporting in real-time. Business owners can structure projects and map them to team goals, and also design repeating tasks you've assigned to individual staff members.

Time-tracking software has become a mini-industry over the last decade. There are even automated tools suited to mobile workers. Employees can check in via text message or social media via smartphone, and business owners can send a whole team or individual employees automated messages. An easy scheduling function simplifies shift work and helps you keep track of who is going where—and when.

Finally, if you employ remote workers and want to create a sense of camaraderie on your team, host meetings via an online solution. Video enabled meetings provides the ability to see and talk to your whole team at once, and can also record calls for missing attendees for later review.

Customer Relationship Management
When it comes to CRM, Salesforce is the traditional gold standard. The basic solution automatically pulls data from your email, calendar and spreadsheets to get a single, 360-degree view of your every customer and your overall business. Its process management practices also help you follow up on leads, close deals, and ensure you're on top of compliance.

Zoho is an AI-powered CRM solution that provides an intelligent personal assistant to pull customer information from the system as needed, prioritize emails by sales pipeline using digital automation and analytics, capture leads and manage your brand's social media interactions, and streamline notifications across multiple channels and respond to customers immediately.

One thing is for certain: Digital automation can be your friend—even if you don't have a lot of money to spend. Consider giving each of these tools a trial period, see what works for your business and integrates well with your other systems and revise your approach as needed.