myOCM.co.uk is a small business administration application created by Orcival Creative Media based in London UK. Our aim is to help small business owners implement admin software in their business to save time, minimize cost, eliminate entry errors, and improve traceability.

Pre-built software

The application is pre-developed with fully functional core capabilities to create quotes, invoices, purchase orders, order acknowledgment, and delivery notes and can be further expanded and customized to meet your specific requirements.

Each client’s application is ring-fenced on our server, thus the application from customer A may have the same look and feel as the application from customer B but they are totally isolated from one another. This gives us the flexibility to custom-design the application to suit individual needs. We can hard code any kind of new features in the back end of the application so the application mirrors exactly the business’s existing processes, instead of having the business change its processes to meet the standard software operating logic.

The primary goal of our application is to reduce manual processing of documentation, such as sales quotations, invoices, purchase orders, order acknowledgment, and delivery notes, to improve the business response time and minimize backlog whilst keeping good records of all transactions. 

The reality of running a business!

Many small business owners hate the laborious tasks of dealing with paperwork and would rather spend their time on their core activities and serving customers. Business documentation is a crucial part of day-to-day trading. Not only, does it help you keep track of your activity but also reinforces end-customer trust and satisfaction.

Keeping good records makes life a lot easier to retrieve data and transaction history. Being able to retrace specific customer or supplier transactions is key to making well-informed business decisions.

However, there is a BUT… As a business owner, if you need to generate all that paperwork manually using templates or trying to manage with a software package that does not exactly suit your business needs and processes, you will be grinding yourself down to a halt and building a huge backlog of paperwork.

Myth number 1 – Recruit and shoo your problems away!

This is usually the time when business owners think of bringing on an employee. The belief is that you can pass on the headache to somebody else.  This is often a bad idea, let me share some of our experiences:

  1. To start, if you faced difficulty handling that amount of paperwork with your intimate knowledge of the business and dedication, do you really think that a freshly arrived employee is going to take on the task and hit the ground running?  Probably not!
  2. The issue was never about manpower. It was about the lack of a system in place that assists you in processing paperwork quickly with a zero-error performance. Suppose you are not providing your employee with a tool that allows him/her to churn out that paperwork quickly and without mistake.  He/She will become your “bottleneck”.
  3. Manual processing of quotations or invoices is inevitably prone to entry errors at the best of times. Your new recruit has virtually zero knowledge about your business, and he/she is supposed to process your most vital documents with a manual Word or Excel template.  Well, good luck with that…there will be a steep learning curve!
  4. You have a strengthened back office, you are free to go out and “get new business”. Now there is twice the amount of business paperwork to deal with. Is your new recruit interested in overtime to catch up on the backlog?
  5. The allure of a quick fix by bringing someone on board often turns out to be time-consuming for the business owner. This often leads to bad vibes in the office and resentment.

The main issue that needs to be recognized here, is that manual processing of all these business documents was an impossible task to start with!  

Myth number 2 – There is a cheap and easy tool for me out there!

Here comes the usual step 2. The feedback of your new recruit is that he/she is having a hard time following the way you operate and he/she spends an enormous of time trying to get it right and this explains the backlog building up. This is when you start thinking about buying cheap and simple management software that could help you “dish out” quotations and invoices, improve efficiency, and be user-friendly. Let me share again our experience:

  1. You scoured the web to find a cheap solution, quick and easy to implement that could be operational in your business this week! Then you realize that quick, cheap, and easy is not a realistic “combo” !  
  2. You finally fall on one of these big software companies like Salesforce, Odoo, Zoho, Hubspot, Bitrix or QuickBooks just to name a few. And then you become very confused as to what you really need, a CRM, a quote software, a full ERP, or an accounting package.
  3. You then spend weeks trying to differentiate between the different services and trying to assess which software fits best your requirements.  You download the free version to evaluate the software and you connect to their sales guys whose sole purpose is to upsell is latest product.
  4. You pick one that looks like is the right fit, then realize that the implementation is a nightmare, and if you want help from the vendor, you must spend an enormous amount of cash to get the software support package.
  5. Well now you have committed to their package, their fee is payable upfront for 12x months, and this is when it hits you! The software is great, but 90% of the features are of no use to you! Whilst trying to set the tool right for your business, it quickly becomes apparent that the software is not exactly matching how your business runs. So you start changing your day-to-day business practices to fit what the software can do.  This is just madness!

The above description is not only the output of 100 interviews we have undertaken with small business owners, this was also our own experience trying to implement these tools in our business. It was so painful and disruptive for a small business such as ours, that we decided to build our own platform.

myOCM is here to help

myOCM was created out of sheer frustration of not being able to find a software company that could relate to our needs, and provide a good level of customization as well as value-for-money. Every small business has its unique way of operating and this is what makes them special and successful in their fields. We recognize that every business shares a common core, they BUY, they SELL and they SHIP goods and/or services. But beyond that, the way they organize their goods and services, how they customize their documents, and how they communicate with their customer is so profoundly different. This is why a “cookie-cutter” or “one-fits-all” approach is far from being perfect.

So, we built our administration tool on these 4x directives:

  • The software tool needs to be affordable. When we talk about affordability, people quickly zoom into the price. The real question to ask is whether the application delivers value. Judging a piece of software should be about whether it resolves a real problem in your business. And if so, whether the cost of your problem outweighs the cost of the software.  This seems a very basic thing to do, but many small business owner falls into this pitfall.
  • myOCM solution: We work on a simple annual fee, that includes the initial software development based on your requirements, any additional features required, software support, software hosting on our server, server maintenance, data backup, and data security.  There is no long-term contract, no hidden cost, and no limitation on the number of users.  This means you can improve collaboration with internal or external users. We aim to please our customers and make sure that if you remain with us is because the application brings value to you, not because we locked you into a long-term contract.     

  • The software should address the business needs, with no need for redundant features.  This is where customization comes into play.  We believe that effective business admin software becomes very powerful when all features are 100% centered on the business needs. If you do not need a feature, then it should not be there, potentially confusing users.
  • myOCM solution: We deploy custom applications for each customer on an isolated server, so we can customize your application to your needs without disturbing any other clients.  This is the KEY! it means more work for us because each application must be managed individually, but that gives us a great degree of flexibility to tailor the application to your specific needs.  This is a huge advantage during implementation because users are therefore presented with an interface familiar to them that matches their existing internal processes.  They do not need to re-learn a new approach.  
  • Cost of customization: We do not sell support packages, we do not charge for setup fees and we do not try to upsell features. We simply agree on an annual budget based on the business-specific requirements. This provides a piece of mind to the business owner and ensures that costs will not escalate through the development work.  

  • Integrity of data. The organization of the data should be registered coherently and easily traceable by the user to ensure control of the day-to-day trading. Users should be able to retrieve easily data about their activity to improve their response time and execution of tasks.
  • myOCM solution:  We designed our platform based on an interconnected large database that contains the historical transactions made by the business. This means that multiple users can interact with the tool and the business owner can extract coherent data to asses his business performance.   

  • Collaboration. The topic of collaboration is probably the most interesting feature of our application. We believe that the world of business is changing and having the ability to engage with remote workers or freelancers opens a huge opportunity for small business owners to tap into a pool of talent worldwide and minimize employment costs.   
  • myOCM solution: The way we built our platform, facilitates the engagement of remote workers with a decent amount of control.  Allowing the business owner to set restrictions on a user means that you can subcontract certain tasks to remote workers within a controlled environment.    

The whole concept of myOCM was predicated on the idea that each business is unique, and as such its business tool should reflect this individuality, by adapting to the business processes and methodologies that made it successful. We believe the era of the “one-fits-all” business management tool is over!