I Audited 10,814 Financial Transactions in One Afternoon With an AI Agent
Vinay Patankar · 14 Mar, 2026 · Technology
I audited 10,814 financial transactions yesterday. Every single row. It took one afternoon. Not me personally. An AI agent I built. Here's the backstory. I'm a CEO. I am not an accountant. But I run a SaaS company, and every month our finance team sends me a financial package. Income statement, burn report, balance sheet. I always read it. I never question it. Because what am I going to do, go through 24 months of QuickBooks line by line? Yesterday I did exactly that. I connected my AI coding agent to our QuickBooks API. Pulled every transaction from the last 24 months. 10,814 rows. Purchases, bills, journal entries, vendor payments. Then I had the agent review every single row against five checks: is it categorized correctly? Is the class assignment right? Is there supporting evidence? Are prepaid amortizations tracking? Are clearing accounts clean? That only works if the agent's output gets treated as evidence to inspect, which is why I keep saying: audit your AI's work every time. The results were not what I expected. 8,494 rows cleared. Clean. 1,888 rows flagged for triage. Missing metadata, ambiguous categories. 56 rows need supporting evidence that doesn't exist in the system. 376 rows are confirmed issues. Wrong classifications, clearing account residue, prepaid amortization gaps, and transactions with no class assignment at all. The February 2026 financial package our team posted? It doesn't reproduce from the current QuickBooks ledger. The cash and prepaid balances don't match. I would have never caught that by reading the PDF. Here's the thing. This wasn't some enterprise financial audit tool. It was a Python script that an AI agent wrote, connected to the QuickBooks API, running checks I described in plain English. Total cost: about $3 in API calls. The script took 20 minutes to build. The audit ran in under 2 hours. The findings would have taken a human analyst days to produce, and they still would have missed the pattern-level issues because nobody reviews 10,814 rows manually. This is the part of AI that doesn't get enough attention. Not the chatbot answering customer questions. Not the copilot drafting your emails. The agent that quietly reviews your entire financial ledger and tells you what your finance team missed. Most CEOs trust their numbers because they don't have the time to verify them. That's not a trust problem. It's an access problem. And AI agents just solved it.
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I'm at a 45,000-Person Conference and My AI Second Brain Is Running My Company Back Home
Vinay Patankar · 12 Mar, 2026 · Technology
I'm at HIMSS this week. 45,000 people. Three days of back-to-back sessions, hallway conversations, and vendor meetings in Las Vegas. My company is running without me. Not because I have a huge team covering for me. Because I built a system that does it. ## The 5 AM Operating System Every morning at 5 AM ET, before I wake up in my hotel room, a 17-step operating system kicks off automatically. It pulls my call recordings from yesterday. Scans my calendar. Runs a company pulse check across Slack, email, and CRM. Enriches any new contacts in our CRM. Triages both my inboxes. Preps me for today's calls. Summarizes everything that happened overnight across every channel. Reviews the sales pipeline. Scans industry news. Generates content ideas. Processes my task backlog. Pulls business metrics. Flags relationships I haven't touched in a while. Audits whether I followed up on last week's meetings. Plans my day. Then it compiles all of it into a single daily brief that's waiting for me when I open my phone. By 6 AM, before I've had coffee, I know exactly what happened, what matters, and what to do first. ## What Happened While I Was on the Conference Floor That's the morning. Here's what happened while I was walking the HIMSS floor on Monday. My system iterated a sales deck from v6 to v9. Four versions in one day. Fixed margins, updated slide content, improved centering. Uploaded each version to Google Drive and posted it to our internal channel for review. It rewrote 12 marketing documents to match our new positioning. Pricing pages, FAQ, competitive analysis, proposal templates, ICP profiles, messaging frameworks. All consistent. All updated in parallel. It ran a full LinkedIn content analysis across 62 published posts and a year of analytics data. Identified that customer case studies with specific numbers outperform everything else by 3x. Documented 14 improvement ideas for our content system. It processed 292 emails across two inboxes. Classified every message. Archived what didn't matter. Created task files for things that needed action. Both inboxes hit zero. I didn't touch any of it. I was in a session about AI agents in clinical workflows. ## The Conference Anxiety Problem Here's the thing nobody talks about at conferences. The CEOs walking around aren't fully present because half their brain is worrying about what's piling up back at the office. The inbox growing. The Slack messages stacking. The decisions waiting. I stopped worrying about that months ago. ## How It Works The system isn't magic. It's an Obsidian vault, Claude Code, a handful of API integrations, and a lot of carefully written skill files that tell the AI exactly how to do each job. The reason that works is the same reason a coding agent is not just a coding tool: it becomes infrastructure around the way you operate. It took months to build. It breaks sometimes. I fix it and it gets better. But the compounding effect is real. Every skill I add makes the next one easier. Every morning pulse run catches things I would have missed. Every triage cycle keeps the noise from turning into chaos. ## Tool vs. Infrastructure I'm not saying every CEO needs to build this. I'm saying the gap between "CEO who uses AI tools" and "CEO whose company runs on AI infrastructure" is getting wider every month. At HIMSS, I watched vendors pitch AI copilots that help with one task at a time. Summarize this note. Draft this email. Answer this question. That's helpful. But it's not the same as a system that wakes up before you do, runs your entire operating rhythm, and hands you a brief that says "here's what happened, here's what matters, here's your plan." One is a tool. The other is infrastructure. I know which one I'd bet on.
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Healthcare Compliance Is Where AI Agents Earn Trust or Lose It Forever
Vinay Patankar · 10 Mar, 2026 · AI
I sell AI automation to hospitals. I spent three days at HIMSS in LV. And honestly? I'm less confident about AI agents in healthcare than when I arrived. Not because the technology is bad. Epic just launched Agent Factory. Microsoft announced Agent 365 at $15 a seat. Every booth had some version of "our AI does the work for you." The demos were good. The compliance conversations were terrifying. I kept ending up in sessions where compliance officers and risk managers were asking the same question in different ways: "Who is responsible when the agent makes the wrong call?" Nobody had a great answer. Trust in healthcare AI isn't about whether the agent can do the task. It's about whether you can prove it did the task correctly, every time, to someone who will fine you if you can't. That's a fundamentally different bar than "it works." That is the regulated-industry version of the control plane problem. A STAT News piece that came out during the conference kind of nailed it: health AI agents are here but validation is not. The capability gap closed. The trust gap didn't. I watched a vendor demo an agent that could process prior authorizations in minutes instead of hours. Legitimately impressive. Then someone in the audience asked "where's the audit trail?" and the demo person kind of froze. There was no audit trail. The agent just did the thing. In healthcare, "it just did the thing" is not an acceptable answer. Joint Commission doesn't care how fast your agent works. They care whether you can produce documentation showing every step, every decision, every exception, and every human review point. The companies getting this right are the ones that started with the compliance architecture and added AI on top. Not the other way around. They built the evidence layer first. Who approved what, when, why, what data was used, what the fallback was if the agent was wrong. The ones getting it wrong are bolting agents onto existing workflows and hoping the existing audit trail covers it. It doesn't. An agent doing work autonomously generates completely different compliance requirements than a human clicking through screens. We see this constantly at Process Street. The organizations that deploy AI agents successfully in regulated environments are the ones that treat compliance as the first design constraint, not the last checkbox. They build the proof infrastructure before they build the automation. Most companies are still doing it backwards. Ship the agent, worry about compliance later. That works fine until survey season. If you're deploying AI agents in healthcare or any regulated industry, the question isn't "can the agent do this?" It's "can we prove to a regulator that the agent did this correctly, and what happens when it didn't?" That's not a feature request. That's the whole product.
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The Agent Boss Is Coming
Vinay Patankar · 08 Mar, 2026 · Technology
I was at DocuSign Partner Day in Las Vegas. A Microsoft exec named Edwin Bargas gave a talk and one thing he said kind of stuck with me. His argument was basically that we're going from copilots to agent teammates to fully agent-operated teams where the human is just the manager. He called that role the "agent boss." All three phases in the next one to three years. He admitted it sounds like science fiction. Then pointed out that everybody said that about AI too, and here we are. Hard to argue with that. Now look. I know "agent boss" sounds like something LinkedIn invented to sell courses. But the actual idea underneath it is real, and we're kind of living it at Process Street right now. We have AI agents running actual processes. Not summarizing documents. Not answering questions. Doing the work. And someone has to make sure they don't mess it up. Turns out that someone needs a completely different skill set than a traditional manager. You don't motivate agents. You don't do 1:1s. You don't coach them through a rough quarter. (They don't have rough quarters. They have bugs.) But you absolutely need to monitor their output, catch their mistakes, and know when to step in. That monitoring layer is why audit loops are becoming a core management habit for AI work. Managing people is inspiration, delegation, development. Managing agents is auditing, configuring, and supervising systems. Less team lead, more air traffic controller. Nobody is training for this yet. Every management book, every leadership course, every MBA program assumes your direct reports are humans. That assumption has about 18 months left, maybe less. The companies that figure this out first won't win because their AI is better. They'll win because their supervision infrastructure is better. The workflows that let a human stay in control when 90% of the work is automated. We have agents doing real task work right now. Phase 2 isn't coming. It's here. Most companies just haven't noticed because they're still arguing about whether to buy a copilot. The question isn't whether agent bosses will exist. It's whether your org will have any idea what to do with them.
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The 47 Clicks Between Patient Intake and Chart Update
Vinay Patankar · 07 Mar, 2026 · Technology
I've been going to a lot of healthcare conferences this year. Every keynote is about AI. Every booth has a copilot demo. But you know what actually stuck with me? Something I saw during a customer implementation. A nurse at a check-in station clicking through 47 screens to move a patient from intake to chart. Forty-seven. I counted. She wasn't slow. She was fast. Muscle memory fast. She'd done this thousands of times. Tab, click, copy, paste, switch system, re-enter the same allergies she just typed in the other system. The whole thing took eleven minutes. Nobody at the conferences I've been to was talking about those eleven minutes. They were talking about AI-powered diagnostics. Clinical decision support. Ambient listening that writes your notes for you. All real. All important. But all of it assumes the underlying workflow works. It doesn't. The dirty secret of healthcare IT is that most of the pain isn't clinical. It's operational. It's the 47 clicks between patient intake and chart update. It's the compliance officer chasing vendor certifications through email chains. It's the credentialing team manually verifying the same documents across three systems that don't talk to each other. These problems aren't sexy. No one puts "we eliminated 30 redundant data entry fields" in their conference booth headline. But that's where the hours are. It is also why healthcare AI agents have to earn trust through workflow evidence, not demo polish. We've seen this pattern across 1,000+ companies at Process Street. The teams that get the most out of AI don't start with the flashy stuff. They start with the workflow nobody wants to own. The one where someone says "oh yeah, that's just how we do it" and everyone nods and moves on. That's the process you automate first. The real AI conversation in healthcare isn't "will AI replace clinicians?" It's "will AI replace the 47 clicks between intake and chart update?" That second question is less dramatic. It's also worth about 10x more.
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My AI Second Brain Already Made Me $4,000
Vinay Patankar · 04 Mar, 2026 · Technology
Most people accept the first offer from their insurance company. I used to be one of them. My garage flooded last month. Six feet of water. Submerged my Tesla, completely bricked. Wetsuits, surfboards, electronics, furniture. Everything in storage, destroyed. The insurance company sent their offer. I was traveling. I had a few days to respond. The number looked reasonable enough. My instinct was to just sign it. That's the play, right? They know you're busy. They know you're not going to spend your weekend pulling receipts and researching comparable claims. So they send you a number that feels close enough, and you take it. I almost did. Instead I sent it to something I've been building for the last few weeks. An AI agent connected to all my personal data. My emails, my purchase history, my documents. I asked it: "Is this claim fair?" It told me no. Then it showed me why. It pulled comparable claims for similar losses. It found my original purchase receipts buried in Gmail going back years. Then it drafted a counter offer with all of that as supporting evidence. I read through it, hit send, and moved on with my day. The result was an extra $4,000. Not because I'm a great negotiator. Not because I spent hours on research. Because I had an agent that doesn't skip the fine print, doesn't lose track of old receipts, and doesn't just accept the first number because it's "close enough." Insurance companies have always had the information advantage. You're one person with a flooded garage and a lot on your plate. They do this thousands of times a day. Now you can have an agent that levels the playing field. For another Technology angle, read Evernote for Spreadsheets.
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Top 10 Compliance Software Platforms
Vinay Patankar · 11 Nov, 2025 · Business-process-management
The compliance software market has shifted away from static documentation tools toward platforms that operate directly within the workflow. Regulators expect more substantial evidence, boards want clearer visibility into risk, and operations teams must continue to move forward while maintaining control. These pressures have expanded the range of software solutions available, from enterprise GRC systems to lightweight operational platforms. This overview examines ten prominent vendors and how they fit into the modern compliance stack, ordered around the practical question of which systems best connect policy, control, and daily execution. ## Process Street Process Street is a platform that combines GRC and Operations into a single compliance operations suite. The platform enables organizations to transform policies into live workflows, integrating controls into day-to-day operations. As tasks are completed, the system automatically captures timestamps, data, approvals, and evidence. This creates a detailed audit trail without requiring manual assembly. The product combines governed documentation, workflow automation, and an agentic AI layer that checks tasks against policy and highlights exceptions. It is used across various industries, including financial services, real estate, healthcare, manufacturing, and the public sector, to manage compliance, employee onboarding, due diligence, internal reviews, recurring control activities, and policy attestations. The central idea is to close the gap between written standards and actual execution. Policies can be updated in one place, linked directly into workflows, and monitored across teams. This positioning makes the platform appealing to organizations that want consistent, auditable operations without the overhead of a heavyweight GRC suite. ## Vanta Vanta is widely recognized for its focus on security and trust management. It automates evidence collection for certifications such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001 by pulling data from cloud infrastructure, identity providers, and other systems. High growth technology companies and fintechs use Vanta to accelerate initial certification and maintain continuous compliance with minimal manual work. The platform excels in technical control monitoring, though broader operational workflows typically sit outside of it. ## Drata Drata operates in a similar segment focused on security and privacy compliance. The platform consolidates controls, risks, and evidence for frameworks including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA. Automated checks and integrations keep compliance data current while reducing reliance on spreadsheets. The system works well for organizations that must manage multiple overlapping security frameworks, although complex business workflows usually run in other tools. ## OneTrust OneTrust is one of the largest vendors in the privacy and data governance space. Its platform covers privacy programs, consent management, data discovery, AI governance, and integrated risk. Enterprises utilize OneTrust to coordinate compliance across various regions and regulatory frameworks. The system supports policy management, regulatory mapping, audit functions, and risk assessments. Its scale and breadth are suitable for organizations with complex compliance needs, though implementations can be lengthy and require specialist attention. ## Diligent One Diligent One focuses on governance and senior-level oversight. It brings together board management, ESG data, risk registers, and audit activity. Directors and executives rely on Diligent for consolidated reporting and governance visibility. The platform is structured around top level risk and compliance oversight rather than operational execution. Evidence and workflow activity typically originate from other systems and are integrated into Diligent through updates. ## NAVEX One NAVEX One is a broad ethics and compliance platform that includes policy management, training, incident reporting, risk management, and third party due diligence. NAVEX has long been associated with hotline and whistleblowing solutions and has expanded into integrated risk. It suits organizations that need a global ethics and compliance program with structured frameworks and training content. Smaller teams with narrower operational needs often find the platform more extensive than necessary. ## ServiceNow GRC ServiceNow GRC is built on the larger ServiceNow platform and connects risk and compliance processes with IT service management and security operations. It supports control testing, exception workflows, risk assessments, and continuous monitoring. Organizations that already rely on ServiceNow can extend the platform to cover compliance and risk functions. For companies without a strong ServiceNow footprint, the required configuration and licensing can feel heavier than more focused alternatives. ## MetricStream MetricStream is a leading provider of enterprise GRC solutions. Its platform integrates enterprise risk, regulatory compliance, internal audit, and cyber risk into a single system. It is commonly used by large enterprises with complex governance structures, especially in financial services, energy, and manufacturing. MetricStream supports structured workflows and global reporting but can require substantial implementation effort. ## LogicGate Risk Cloud LogicGate Risk Cloud is a no code GRC platform that prioritizes flexibility. Organizations can configure custom workflows, data models, and approval paths, allowing them to tailor processes without significant engineering work. This makes it useful for mid-sized firms migrating away from spreadsheet-based compliance. The flexibility places more responsibility on internal teams to design and maintain processes. ## Hyperproof Hyperproof is a continuous control management platform for security and privacy frameworks. It helps organizations manage SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIST, and PCI from a single system and reuse evidence across frameworks. Controls can be maintained through scheduled tasks and dashboards that track compliance health. The platform is suited for teams that treat security compliance as a recurring operational program rather than a periodic audit exercise. ## How Organizations Approach These Options Although these platforms are grouped within the compliance or GRC category, they solve different problems. Enterprise GRC systems such as MetricStream, NAVEX, ServiceNow, and Diligent focus on governance, oversight, and structured risk frameworks. Security automation platforms, such as Vanta, Drata, and Hyperproof, focus on technical controls and certification readiness. Privacy and data governance platforms such as OneTrust address regulatory complexity in data handling. Process Street sits closer to the operational layer. It is designed for organizations that need to connect policies and controls directly to the work that staff carry out every day. Evidence is captured as tasks are completed, allowing firms to demonstrate compliance without requiring heavy manual preparation. Many organizations combine tools from these categories, allowing enterprise GRC to provide governance, security platforms to handle technical controls, and a Compliance Operations Platform to ensure that workflows are executed consistently, with proof generated in real-time. Related read in Business Process Management: Process Outsourcing Software.
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Building Cora: Our AI Compliance Agent
Vinay Patankar · 18 Jul, 2025 · Business · Document-management
When we started Process Street, our goal was simple. Help teams run recurring work without mistakes. The world didn’t need another task manager. It needed a system that could enforce standards, catch skipped steps, and give teams confidence that what should happen actually did. So we built it. A process management platform that made SOPs executable. A no-code workflow engine that turned policy into action. A tool that teams could actually use without calling IT. Over time, our customers pushed us further. Regulated industries brought their toughest workflows. Financial controls. Risk reviews. Policy certifications. Audit procedures. And that’s when it became clear. We weren’t just in the business of process. We were in the business of proof. From Process Management to Compliance Operations It wasn’t enough to help people document what to do. We needed to ensure it was done, every time, by everyone, with evidence. That’s where compliance operations come in. Compliance operations is what happens when you connect policies to workflows, workflows to monitoring, and monitoring to real-time action. It’s the difference between a checklist and a control system. Between paper compliance and actual enforcement. That’s where Process Street is today. Docs is where policies are created, governed, and versioned. Ops is where those policies become workflows, executed with full audit trails. And now, we’re building the intelligence layer to tie it all together. Enter Cora. Our AI Compliance Agent. Cora (which stands for "Compliance Orchestration and Risk Agent) is not a chatbot. Cora is not another assistant with a cute name. Cora is a system of enforcement. It watches how work gets done. Flags when it drifts from policy. Suggests updates when regulations shift. And generates the proof teams need to pass any audit, without the scramble. It’s not here to make compliance easier. It’s here to make it automatic. Why We’re Building Cora on AWS You don’t build a compliance-grade AI system on weekend infrastructure. Cora runs long sessions. Monitors real workflows. Triggers real consequences. We needed scale, security, and performance without compromise. That’s why we’re building on AWS. AWS AgentCore gives us exactly what we need. - Long-running agents that can observe and act in real time - Secure, isolated sessions that respect data boundaries - Deep integration into the services that power enterprise operations This is not a prototype. This is the foundation for the next generation of compliance enforcement. What’s Next We’re starting with the high-stakes use cases, capital markets, risk teams, and audit-heavy ops. But Cora is not a one-off. It's a system. A platform. A new layer for how compliance gets done across every industry. Process Street is now a Compliance Operations Platform. Cora is our intelligence layer. AWS is our partner in making it real. If you’re building the future of AI, compliance, or operations, let’s talk. No more missed steps. No more compliance theater. Just policy, executed. Related read in Business: Process Diagrams.
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Customer Development Questions for Startup Founders
Vinay Patankar · 01 Apr, 2024 · Business-process-management
At Process Street, our relentless pursuit of customer development is fundamentally about one thing: nailing product-market fit as swiftly as we can. We're in the business of building not just products, but solutions that truly resonate with the needs and hurdles our users face daily. This conviction has driven us to put together a set of probing questions that go beyond mere inquiry. They're a direct line to the pulse of our customers, designed to peel back layers of surface-level feedback and unearth the core insights that can steer our offerings towards immense value for our customers. Demo Questions: Their Name: Their title: Their company name: Their company size: Their industry/vertical: Understand their Current State: TIP: Begin by focusing on the customer. Encourage them to articulate their issue in their own terms. This conversation should center on their needs, not the specifics of your product or services. Q: Describe your current process for X. What works? What doesn’t? (For new customers) What were your operations for X before you hired us? Q: How does your team stay on top of X or don’t get overwhelmed by Y? Q: What are a few of the tools you currently use? What do you like about them? Q: What do you not like? Uncover Their Biggest Problem: Q: What problems do you face when trying to do X today? Tell me more. Q: What people on your team or company are impacted by this problem? How does it affect their day? Q: How long has this been a problem? Q: What solutions have you tried to implement? Did they work? Q: What obstacles have you encountered to solving this problem? Define Their Ideal Solution: Q: How important is it to you/your organization to solve this challenge? Q: What would be an ideal solution to this problem? Why is that the best solution? Q: In a perfect world, how quickly would you solve this issue? Sample Benefit questions: Q: What impacts does problem X have on your business? Q: What happens if you do nothing to solve it? Q: What would it mean for you, your team, and your business to solve this problem? Get the Real Impact of a Solution TIP: Don't presume that stated benefits automatically imply significant impact. It's crucial to determine whether the impact is substantial enough to motivate a purchase. What would you do, or do more of, if you had more time in your day? How important is being able to do more to you, your team, and your organization? If this Business Process Management topic resonated, continue with How to Hire a Virtual Assistant for Startup Success.
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Why Your Remote Team Will Fall Apart Without Processes
Vinay Patankar · 27 Apr, 2020 · Business-process-management · Business-systematization
There's a psychological theory developed back in 1895 that still holds true today that can help explain why remote teams fall apart if they're mismanaged. It's called deindividuation, and states that when groups of people can't be identified in a group, they're more likely to misbehave, e.g. cause violence, riot. To put it in the words of Gustave Le Bon, the psychologist who first theorized this, “a loss of personal responsibility in crowds leads to an inclination to behave primitively and hedonistically”. Bear with me… This might sound like a long shot, but it holds true for remote teams, too. In an office, everyone is held physically accountable for the work they do. They're a tangible employee in a building, being actually overseen by other people. In a remote team, everyone's just an icon on Slack, an email address, or a source of app notifications. If team members feel like they can get away with not communicating, not keeping their team updated, and not getting work done, they're much more likely to. And that's why remote teams are fragile. This is a shame for businesses who can't manage them because 77% of remote workers are more productive than their office counterparts, and get more done in less time. In this article, I'll look at the problems that come along with having a remote team, and go through some methods for solving them. ## Problem #1: No accountability without remote team processes In an office you keep your team updated naturally by chatting how work's going on the way to lunch, or just mentioning your progress while you have a coffee break. However, many remote workers report feeling isolated, which is part of what creates a lack of accountability, causing teams to go silent and work to start slipping. How do you solve a lack of accountability? At Process Street, our remote marketing team has several channels of communication and policies that mean we always keep in the loop: - A group Slack channel - Trello card comments - Two short meetings every Tuesday and Thursday It's enforced that all work-related conversations amongst the marketing team must go into the group chat, creating an activity log of work and information. Any task being discussed must be presented alongside a link to its Trello card, and it's expected that all Trello cards will be commented on whenever progress has been made. During the meetings, we present our Trello cards to each other for review as proof of work (plus an activity log recorded in Trello/Slack), and go through the tasks together. Using a Standard Operating Procedure software is a great way to ensure that everyone adheres to the same way of doing things. This approach leaves absolutely no room for a lack of accountability. If team members aren't working on their tasks, it's totally obvious because there will be no record of it. ## Problem #2: No centralization of information without remote team workflows With your whole team collaborating over the internet (without opportunities just to look over their co-worker's shoulder) it can be a pain to share information if it isn't centralized. It's an obvious problem for businesses since some of the biggest software companies — Dropbox, Box and other document management systems — were created purely to solve it. ### How do you centralize information? One of the main ways to do it is to make sure you're working entirely on the cloud. We've written about all of the SaaS (software-as-a-service) products we use together before, and it made me realize how stuck we'd be without live collaboration and the ability to store information in the best, most easily accessible places. As I said in the solution to problem #1, everything can dumped into a Trello card. Trello cards can hold links, attachments, images, and even spreadsheets, so there's no excuse for not centralizing information when it's that easy. For documents, we use Quip and Google Sheets, ensuring we can always access what we need, no matter where we are. Get information centralized by enforcing all work-in-progress task material to be uploaded to Google Drive or Dropbox, or dropped into a project management app like Trello or Asana. ## Problem #3: No teambuilding without remote planning Building camaraderie through direct messages is easier than before thanks to the prevalence of emojis, gifs, and other just-for-fun things, but it's nowhere near as easy as when you're face-to-face. You might get invited to a get-together after work if you're in an office, but that's not the kind of thing that'll happen in a remote team, and neither will natural team-building. This could mean that team members are shy, uncommunicative, or less productive because they feel isolated, especially when first joining a new team. Managers should nip this in the bud by facilitating effective employee onboarding. The onboarding stage is integral and it sets the tone for your new employee. Using an onboarding software can be a great way to centralize information, get insightful feedback all while welcoming your new hire aboard. ### How do you improve remote team building? The ways that have worked in our remote team have been have: - gaming tournaments (playing the card game Hearthstone against each other to win a prize) - sharing videos, movies, and music (we will share weekly recommendations, such as guilty pleasure movies, music to help focus) - having a general chat channel (a work-unrelated channel for water-cooler style conversation) If those options don't suit, you can also try this list of team building activities for remote teams. ## The long-term solution: Agile process management All three problems explained in this article are caused by a lack of communication, policy, and process. As Atul Gawande explains in The Checklist Manifesto, key aspects of how we get work done can be overlooked without a process, and policy to enforce it. “When we look closely, we recognize the same balls being dropped over and over, even by those of great ability and determination. We know the patterns. We see the costs. It’s time to try something else.” — Atul Gawande Remote teams are susceptible to disconnection, deviance from process, and an attitude of unaccountability. As Gawande says, and as we’ve found in our time building process software, the solution is strict regulations and processes that enforce the centralization of information, encourage communication in open channels, and actively build culture. It doesn’t sound as appealing as letting a strong team grow organically, but it’s a lot more likely to work. ## Resources to help you get started: Your remote team processes! Below are some public Process Street templates and then a whole load of really useful blog posts they've published too, to help you get started and systemize your remote business! ### Process Street remote team processes - Daily Schedule Template - Daily Standup Meeting Checklist - Employee Onboarding Checklist - Employee Background Check - Job Application Form - Job Description Template - Performance Review Checklist - Project Proposal Template - Sprint Planning - Sprint Retrospective Process - Recruitment Process - Standup Meeting Checklist ### Remote team blog posts about remote work processes - Virtual Team: How to Excel at Remote Working (Free Templates) - The 19 Best Tips from My 3 Years Working Remotely - The Complete Guide to Asynchronous Communication in Remote Teams - Best Video Conferencing App: Skype vs Hangouts vs GoToMeeting vs Zoom vs Join.me vs Appear.in - How to Use Slack Like a Pro and Become a Power User (22 Tips & Tricks) - How to Run Business Meetings That Aren’t a Useless Waste of Time - 7 Key Tools for the Ultimate Paperless Office (Your Go-Paperless-Stack) - 14 Ways Your Team Can Boost Productivity While Working From Home - 8 Top Workplace Team Chat Apps for Effective Team Communication in 2019 - The 11 Agile Processes We Use to Run an Efficient Software Team - Content Creation Workflows: Why You Need One and How to Build It - How to Write a Proposal and Get What You Want (Free Template) - Approvals: How to Streamline Decision-Making in Process Street - 6 Checklists to Perfect your New Employee Onboarding Process - What is an SOP? 16 Essential Steps to Writing Standard Operating Procedures - ISO 9001: The Ultimate QMS Guide (Basics, Implementation, ISO Templates) - What is BPM Software? The Best Business Process Management Software (BPMS) - Best Way to Learn Spanish: A 6 Month Process That Works for You - The 14 Best Language Learning Apps for Fluency in 2019 - The 7 Best Language Learning Software of 2018: The Awards! - Breakdown of the Best Workflow Management Software - 5 Free ISO 14001 Checklist Templates for Environmental Management - ISO 19011:2018 Basics (8 Free Management System Audit Checklists) - 6 Powerful PPC Management Checklists to Run Paid Ads - 20 Free SOP Templates to Make Recording Processes Quick and Painless - ISO 50001: The Ultimate Guide to Energy Management Systems (EnMS) - What is HRIS? The Best Software for a Human Resources Information System - Agile ISO: A Holistic Business Process Management Framework - Product Market Space: An Evolving Conception of Product-Market Fit I think this is a pretty complete round up! If you have any other recommendations or resources, leave them in the comments below! If this Business Process Management topic resonated, continue with How to Build Efficient Processes for Your Remote Team.
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Accel, Atlassian & Salesforce Leads $12m Series A for Process Streets No-Code Workflow App
Vinay Patankar · 23 Mar, 2020 · Business
2020 – San Francisco… Read more about this announcement on Business Insider, Crunchbase and Forbes. I’m very proud and excited to announce that Process Street has raised a $12M Series A from Accel, Atlassian, Salesforce Ventures and other amazing investors. The funds will go towards our vision of building the GitHub of no-code; where teams around the world can find and use checklists, workflows and automations to improve their productivity at work. Our mission is to make recurring work fun, fast, and faultless for teams everywhere. Having experienced investors and leading SaaS partners will put us in a powerful position to achieve this mission. ## The Process Street story so far Process Street started as an internal tool to document and track simple checklist-based processes. We were running a distributed marketing agency with contractors all around the world and were struggling to keep our repetitive processes on track. Spreadsheets and project management tools were causing more problems than solutions. We needed a tool to provide structure and manage internal workflows, so we built Process Street. We’ve grown that simple tool into a fully-fledged no-code workflow builder with an easy-to-use interface that can handle almost any type of business process, from client implementation to employee onboarding and content approvals. We are proud to service over 450,000+ registered users including enterprise customers like Colliers, Accenture, Spotify and Airbnb, as well as institutions like Columbia University and Johns Hopkins University. Process Street continues its distributed roots as a fully remote team with 45 members spread across North America and Europe. It’s a popular tool for remote organizations, and we use it heavily internally, but we’ve found an even greater market in distributed enterprises; large organizations looking to standardize and automate work across vast geographical areas. ## Why Accel, Atlassian & Salesforce Ventures? We chose to partner with Accel because they believe in product-led growth, understand the SaaS space, and know-how to deliver maximum value at scale. The experience built within Accel from investments in Atlassian, Slack and Dropbox means they’ve been on this journey before. Rich Wong, Partner at Accel will be joining our Board. Rich has been an investor and Board Member in fast-growth SaaS leaders such as Atlassian, Checkr and UiPath, and we look forward to leveraging his wealth of experience and expertise to further our growth. Salesforce Ventures and Atlassian were obvious partners. Salesforce Ventures has the leading global portfolio of enterprise SaaS companies and brings access to the Salesforce platform and their customers. Process Street workflows are tightly integrated with other SaaS products and rely on the data and activity happening in these systems to automate work. Our customers integrate with hundreds of different SaaS products, but Salesforce, Trello and Jira are among the most popular. ## What’s next for Process Street? The future for Process Street is to be the no-code workflow solution for teams everywhere. We want to expand how and where teams can manage their work. To make this happen, we’ll be launching a mobile app, a redesigned experience, and building on our recent improvements to enable manager approvals on-the-go. Process Street has a giant library of plug-and-play process templates created by our team, customers and partners. We’ll continue to grow this to be the largest repository in the world for all workflows and operational playbooks; the GitHub for knowledge workers. We’re going to be launching further enterprise features for improved reporting and analysis, while opening up greater API access to let teams control their data and build custom automations. We’ll also look to deepen existing partnerships and forge new ones. This will mean greater alignment between Process Street and the other products you already rely on, furthering our seamless integrations. We are beyond grateful for all of your continued support and can’t wait to keep working with you in the years ahead. Many thanks, Vinay Patankar, CEO. Read on Process Street Blog. For another Business angle, read App Idea - Turn iPhone's into Public Hot-spots.
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The Best Standard Operating Procedure Software
Vinay Patankar · 14 Jan, 2020 · Standard-operating-procedures
Here is a new video we made on our product Process Street. We built Process Street to be the best standard operating procedure software on the planet. Watch the below video to see how it in action: ## Click Here to Create a Free Account # Standard Operating Procedure Software Standard Operating Procedure software is a kind of software that captures and structures your organizations ongoing procedures. Procedures are generally structured in a format either derived by ISO Standards or designed in house in the company. SOP Software is a subcategory of Enterprise Content Management or Knowledge Management and is essential for ensuring quality and consistency across an organization. Common procedures that are documented include: - Human Resources - Marketing - Finance - Operations - Manufacturing There are many tools out there to help you document, capture and track standard operating procedures but the tool we are building goes a step above and beyond. ## The Best Standard Operating Procedure Software ## Click Here to Create a Free Account The product we have designed is a workflow software called Process Street and not only does it allows you to easily capture company procedures, but it helps you execute those processes effectively, by turning documents into interactive checklists that you track and report on. This really is a new way of handling operational documentation which traditionally is stored in flat files like word documents and wikis. Those traditional tools are clunky and slow, forcing people to trudge through hundreds of pages of static information without breaking it down or making it easily accessible. Process Street business process management software is also hosted on the cloud meaning it can be accessed from anywhere, anytime on any device. ## Standard Operating Procedure Examples Below are some example standard operating procedures designed using Process Street ### Here are some of the reviews from Capterra: Standard Processes Minimize Training Costs Kim A. - Founder and President Computer Software, 11-50 employees Used the software for: 1-2 years Pros: I love that we can create the process steps we need for all of our standard processes. We can create mandatory steps, and we can also see where a process is, and if someone is out, another person can pick it up and complete it. It's brilliant!! Cons: I would like a way to share processes with other Process.St customers -- so they can have the processes within their Process.St account -- ideally, I would like to share an entire folder of processes with someone - and that would prompt them to set up their own Process.St account, and import the processes to their account. We would like to share these processes with our customers who need guidance on implementing certain things in their business... and it would be a way we could help Process.St grow, while serving our own customers and the growth of their businesses as well. Overall: It has allowed us to standardize the way things get done, and document processes that are repetitively done with our customers, so we can scale our staff and get people productive a lot faster than traditional hiring and training. We love Process Street! Nathan R. CEO Pros: The ability to quickly edit and customize a process is very helpful. The development team has also been very helpful and responsive. Cons: Not much - it's clean, it just works, and the team seems to be focused on improving. Overall: I've used this app to help set up meeting structures with my team. We have a set checklist of items to talk about on a regular basis, and this app helps us to move through them together, with visual aids and reminders, with checklists, and more, in a way that we choose. I also use it for repeating processes in my own planning, journaling, and decision making. I've taken checklists from personal development speakers and writers, and broken their ideas/suggestions into tasks. With Process.St, i can set them up with reminders, visuals, and videos in ways that help me cruise through these tasks to get the results smoothly and easily. Recommendations to other buyers: Get started with it! Also, check out "The Checklist Manifesto" by Atul Gawande - it could be a good introduction with regards to setting up processes. Related read in Standard Operating Procedures: Examples of Standard Operating Procedures.
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