“Do more with less.”

How many times have you heard that phrase? If you’re of a certain age, it’s likely been a constant refrain throughout your working life. Budget cuts? We’ll have to do more with less. A key employee left? No problem, just do more with less. We need to increase profitability? You guessed it — time to do more with less.

In the past, though, that mantra usually meant forcing people to multitask. And contrary to popular belief, we’re not good at multitasking. In fact, we’re worse than “not good.” Most of us are flat-out bad.

As it turns out, instead of successfully doing more with less, we often do less with less: The brief mental blocks created by moving from task to task can cost employees up to 40% of their productive time, according to the American Psychological Association. The financial cost is enormous, too. Bryan University estimates that this drag on productivity results in global losses of nearly half a trillion dollars each year.

Less doesn’t always mean what you think
That’s why automation is so exciting. It provides an opportunity to actually do more with less — and that doesn’t have to mean “less” in terms of staff, either. Automating certain tasks can mean less frustration, less busy work, and less confusion, which means fewer errors. At the same time, it also frees employees to deliver more value by focusing on your customers’ more complex needs.

In a way, you serve as a kind of automated solution for your clients. They enlist you to help them deliver their goods more efficiently by complying with a wide range of regulations from country to country, product to product, so they don’t have to worry about it. And you give them many of the same benefits of automation, such as freeing up staff time, increasing accuracy, and reducing frustration.

But while you’re helping clients boost their efficiency, is your operation as efficient as it could be? Are your employees caught in the multitasking trap? If they’re manually researching and assigning Harmonized System codes, in addition to their other duties, you might be paying a steep price without even realizing it.

Use resources more effectively - and provide better service to clients
There’s a reason your clients don’t want to manage the tedious process of classifying products for global markets: It’s time-consuming and complex. Yet if you’re doing this manually for them, you’ve essentially put yourself in the same position your clients are trying to avoid.

There’s a better way, one that allows you to deliver efficiency to clients while avoiding inefficiencies in your own business.

Avalara Managed Tariff Code Classification quickly identifies the right Harmonized System (HS) codes for each product and country, utilizing machine learning to determine the composition, form, and function of products — then applying the data far faster than a human can.

That means no more manual research when you receive periodic and sizable product catalogs from your clients, no more time wasted figuring out the most accurate HS code for each country, no more struggling to keep up with today’s pace of global retailing.

And because Avalara Managed Tariff Code Classification removes a significant part of the workload for one or more of your employees, the possibilities are truly endless: What could they achieve with that additional time? What other parts of your business could they support? How could they drive growth and profitability?

When you have the power of Avalara, you don’t have to try to do more with less. You can just focus on doing more.

How can we help you do more? Visit the Managed Tariff Code Classification product page for ideas and information.