There are many reasons for starting using a paperless meeting solution, and the most important one is that the board portal has support for automating routine board processes. It really speeds up the business growth process and saves time for all board members when all tasks are set and resolved as quickly as possible and everyone gets around the paperwork.
Everyone has had document losses due to the overload of work processes. Everyone was faced with the need to quickly sign a particular document that was in a pile of equally important documents. Or imagine that you need to assemble an urgent meeting that will take place in ten minutes. Would you email each board member or call them manually? That would just take up a lot of precious time. And what if one of them doesn’t have the right software on hand? In that case, the meeting won’t be as effective as it could have been. That’s where board management software comes in.
What board management software can do?
Overall, this group of applications has its basic functions. Now a hundred vendors offer a lot of different products with their own pros and cons, but the fundamental set remains the same:
- Agenda Builder: You can use templates or write your own agenda from scratch.
- Board Packet: Contains all the materials for effective meetings.
- Document Center: The availability of a secure place where all documents are stored.
- Interactive Meetings: In fact, the online board meeting capability is one of the most necessary and important in this type of application.
- Task Manager: Task management is essential for tracking the effective execution of a premeditated work plan.
- Groups: Groups are necessary for effective interaction between all meeting participants .
These are just the basic functions that every Board portal software has. There are many additional features, variations in the user interface, and more that differ from one vendor to another.
What types of businesses would be suitable for implementation?
Actually, any kind. As mentioned earlier, there are now more than a hundred different kinds of virtual board software on the market. And each of them focuses on a particular business or several groups of businesses.
For example, one of the most popular providers, BoardPro, focuses on medium and large businesses. Why? Because of the big number of functions and quality service. But at the same time, it lacks some of the necessary features like digital document signatures, which may be a problem for the type of running your business.
The equally famous Diligent Boards emphasizes its service to large businesses, nonprofits, and government entities. They have all the legal and technical capabilities to do business in a public enterprise environment. And compared to BoardPro, they have the ability to digitally sign documents, which is one of the necessary aspects for most large businesses.
Wrike, for example, focuses its service on small businesses or start-ups. That doesn’t mean they don’t work with medium and large businesses, but they can hardly offer anything that the giants of the industry can’t. They even have a completely open-ended free plan for very small businesses, where the board of directors can try the app’s performance and decide in the future whether or not they need a paid subscription.
How to choose a product that works best for you?
Before considering several Virtual boardroom providers, you should ask yourself a few questions, after which the decision will come by itself:
- Would there be an improvement in overall performance if all the suggested features were considered? As has been said before, the basic functions are few, but there are a lot of additional functions. And your choice is based on them. Some providers emphasize additional features that would be applicable to a large business but are useless for a small one. You have to consider each feature and think: will you need it when dealing with strategic issues of the company or during a board meeting?
- How do the alerts in this app work? Many people miss this point and get confused when the product is already purchased. Some of the providers don’t offer modern solutions in the form of in-app notifications. That is, they only take into account within their functionality the ability to notify about upcoming meetings a few days in advance. But what if you need to have a meeting right now within ten minutes? Hardly anyone checks their email every ten minutes.
- Is it compatible with the operating systems the board uses? This is the most tricky and arcane question. There are cases where entrepreneurs buy a product and it is not supported within Android or iOS. It trivially has no mobility, it is only tied to the office location. Remember, that flexibility is one of the mandatory requirements of the modern world.
These are the really important points. You could emphasize something else like security and free trial and stuff like that, but almost everyone has it. It’s part of the basic features. In any case, you can review in detail the most popular providers due to your business request.
The post Why You Should Start Using A Board Portal Today To Achieve Your Goals Faster appeared first on Productivity Land .