Every software provider says that their software is easy to use. But how do you know that the software is easy to use both by your team and by your investors?
Here are a few things you should keep in mind when checking whether the investment management software is really user-friendly or not.
1. End-to-end functionality of the software: The investment management software should support the basis as well as the advanced needs of your team and your investors. The features of the product or software should not come in the way of completing a task or making the process a manual task. Specific needs should have special features to complete the task.
For instance, if you are managing a fund, the investment management software should be able to understand and apply related accounting principles like realized or unrealized gains and if you are handling sensitive or private information, the software should be able to restrict the access of the information to people who should not have access to the information. This is the first thing you should check.
2. Software should be easy to navigate: If the software is not easy to navigate through then solving complex problems becomes much more difficult. Features and commands which are common should be easy to access and the features which are advanced should be able to locate or find within the interface easily and quickly. Easy to use or quickly to access features should not be accounted for the limited functions of the software. Easy navigation through the software without any hindrances will create a rich user experience. if these all criteria are met then we can say that the software is easy to use both by the investor as well as the investee.
3. Gracefully appealing: The GUI or the Graphic User Interface should be clean and easy to navigate, but not cause any complications while using the software. The primary job of the GUI or the Graphic User Interface is to make the software user’s job simple and hassle-free
For example, google’s graphic user interface on the home page is clean as well as so powerful that it makes the user’s job more simple and pleasant. Thus the homepage should be muddled or overloaded with too many buttons and options which in turn makes the job or task much more difficult.
4. The software should be malleable: the software should be flexible with working according to the team’s present work-related practices. Optimizing it according to your work system is very important. For example, if you are working on a real estate investment management software, it should be able to recognize fields from the Yardi software, be able to import and export functions to an excel sheet, and also have the flexibility to work with any general ledger or any chart of accounts.in simple words, the software should be able to work and understand information on different platforms easily and quickly without any difficulty.
5. The software should be easy to configure: As the company grows so do its needs to evolve or grow, and so should the software be able to configure the needs according to the company’s growth. Software that grows with the company allows you to do more tasks when you need them to be done.
For example, it should allow you to add your own custom data fields to your customer relationship management contacts, customize your email format according to your need or segregate a different group of investors with different needs and different returns.
6. It should have the ability to filter and organize the data: The investment management software should be able to filter contacts, and entities and organize them and make the task more streamlined and simple for the user. While using the investment management software you should be able to filter the entities according to their types and status, and categorize contacts according to their prospects, which investment they are interested in, what type of investor they are and what size their deal is.
7. The team behind the software should understand you: the team or the programmer who made should be able to understand the needs of your company or your clients and investors. They should be able to understand what type of problems the software will be solving for you. Only then the software will be great to work with.
To avoid any problems down the road with your service provider, select a company that does extensive research on its user’s needs. The team behind the development of your software should have an in-depth knowledge of your company’s structure and way of work, only then it will be able to make great software for you to use.
8. Reliable software and software provider: generally the software provider should have a history of zero technical errors, but such providers are hard to come by. The least you can do is to search for such a provider that a company you know uses, has a great user interface, has been tried and tested before, and does not crash or malfunction often. If you find such a provider then go for it and procure the software and wish that it does not cause any problems in the future.
9. Good customer service which is wanting you to succeed: you will still need help when your software crashes or malfunctions no matter how user-friendly or powerful your software provider is. In such times there should be a well-trained and professional customer service or support team to help you get through the problem you are facing. Users should have easy access to a robust customer success team that can solve their problems with ease and as quickly as possible. You should be able to know whether your customer support team has the tools and resources to answer your questions easily and quickly.
Thus if you follow these guidelines you might be able to know whether the investment management software you are using or about to procure is easy to use and is user-friendly or not.
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