5 reasons why your business needs a good database
Spreadsheets are great tools for number crunching. But if you have lots of data, for example on customers, staff, or your inventory, you may benefit from a more efficient data management tool. Here's why you should consider replacing spreadsheets with databases to help your business grow…
1. Centralized systems
If your business is growing and you have the staff to help you run it, keeping track of the increasing amount of data can be tricky. Good database systems can help you manage all your business-critical data centrally, safely, and securely - whenever you need it - to boost your chances of success.
2. Better management of human resource (HR) matters
Using an HR database to manage staff records can save you time and money. It can streamline most of the HR tasks, automate routine jobs, and speed up the processing of data such as staff hours, leave, benefits, payroll, etc. This can leave you more time to focus on growing your business.
3. Managing customer data and relationships
If customers are the lifeblood of your business, then a good customer relationship management (CRM) database should be at the heart of your growth plans. Full-featured CRM databases are usually powerful enough to store and process everything, from customer contact details, interaction history, and accounts, to new prospects, leads, and business opportunities. Some CRM systems can even help you run and track marketing campaigns, such as email newsletters. See more on customer relationship management (Links to an external site.).
4. Efficient inventory tracking
Managing your inventory well can occasionally feel like a balancing act. It's easy to have too much - sitting on a shelf risking wastage, or too little - disappointing your customers and damaging your reputation. If you're tracking your inventory manually, it's also easy to miscount, make data entry errors, or misplace spreadsheets and notes. By employing an inventory tracking database, especially alongside electronic data interchange and barcode scanning, you can avoid those risks and minimize lost sales while maximizing your opportunities for growth.
5. Planning for growth
Most business databases have some form of reporting capabilities – from analyzing input data and productivity tracking, to anticipating future trends and customers' needs. If you’re planning a strategy for growth, a robust database system can be your business' most valuable resource.
What is a CMS: Content Management System
A content management system or CMS is a software that facilitates creating, editing, organizing, and publishing content. WordPress is a Content Management System, that allows you to create and publish your content on the web. Although it is mostly used for web publishing, it can be used to manage content on an intranet, or in a single computer.
WordPress allows users to have full control over the files, documents, as well as the design and display of the content. You don’t have to know a single line of code to publish content using WordPress. The beauty of a good content management system is to allow any user to create and manage their content without any technical know-how.
In the earlier days, an average user or a small company had to rely on static HTML sites because they could not afford a content management system which would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. That problem is now solved. WordPress is open source and free for anyone to use.
WordPress is being used in all sorts of creative ways. We have seen WordPress being used to power small business websites, blogs, large university websites, portfolios, real estate property listing site, an internal communication system for companies, web directories, movie databases, application infrastructure base, arcade sites, and basically anything else you can think of.
In this assignment, we are going to use Microsoft Access to store the pages for our website and the contact information for our business cards, or personal content.
The preperation section provides you with the elements needed to complete the requirements.
The following steps must be completed to receive the associated points for each step.
Any item marked with a * must be completed to receive a score above 0.