Rakesh Prabhakar is the Head of Zoho Australia and New Zealand. In this piece, he explains how small businesses are using data and automation to grow right now.
Overcoming challenges is part and parcel of running a small business, but in recent years, they’ve been especially demanding. Rising operational costs and high interest rates have squeezed margins, with small business insolvencies reaching record highs in the last six months, according to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.
Despite these challenges, there’s a growing sense of optimism within small businesses in 2025. Nearly half (46.6 per cent) expect their cashflow to improve in the next 3-12 months, according to Zoho research, while 29 per cent “see a lot of growth opportunity” in the next 12-18 months and 34 per cent believe they’re “recovering nicely”.
Their second biggest priority in 2025 – after simply ‘staying afloat’ – is to automate or digitise their business. As they look to turn optimism into growth in 2025, what role can data and automation play?
Let’s look at the role data can play in two critical operations: finance and customer service.
Optimising accounting and finance
Financial management is the backbone of every small business, and leveraging data is key to improving efficiency and strategy.
Two in three (67 per cent) SMEs consider accounting and bookkeeping software their most critical technology investment in 2025. Automation plays a vital role in streamlining financial processes, reducing administrative burdens, and minimising errors.
For example, let’s say you’re a small builder working manually. You spend hours providing a quote, collecting physical receipts – which often get lost amongst those for other jobs – scouring time sheets for employee hours, sending an invoice or PO, chasing an outstanding payment. Automated finance tools would cut the process down by many hours. From the first action to the last, everything is automated, drastically reducing the administrative burden and risk of human error. And when a payment is made, everything syncs to an SMEs accounting platform, to make real-time tracking and EOFY obligations seamless.
Data, meanwhile, allows SMEs to benefit from real-time business-wide insights, make accurate forecasts and connect formerly disparate processes or teams. It SMEs to predict cashflow, understand profitability – not just overall, but for particular products, service and team members – track the cost of materials and labour, and more. This doesn’t just guide finance teams, but can inform broader business decisions, for example sales guiding teams to prioritise more profitable products or services.
Enhancing customer support
With almost half (45 per cent) of SMEs considering investing in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software in 2025, focusing on customer support and experience is clearly a big priority. But how can SMEs turn support and experience into drivers of retention and acquisition?
Approved customer data enables SMEs to establish important insights into customer preferences, habits and even pain points. Data can be used to not only tailor personalised product offerings to customers based on past orders or their recent online review, but to remove hurdles too. For example, if a small retailer notices they have high rates of cart abandonment, it’s a sign to improve their checkout process.
Consumers don’t just want personalisation, they want speed and convenience too. Automated chatbots can resolve common queries instantly, for example answering FAQs, it improves not only the customer experience, but also operational efficiency. If an SME can automate common tasks like scheduling appointments, requesting feedback or sending order updates, it frees up team members for more nuanced, meaningful or revenue-generating tasks.
SMEs that take a proactive, data-first approach – not just in their finance and customer support, but business-wide – will be well-positioned to not only weather economic pressures but turn their growing confidence into cashflow. The key to success lies not just in surviving but in using data to unlock new opportunities, adapt swiftly, and drive long-term growth.
