Future Dot Now: Mastering Digital Transactions

As digital processes become increasingly essential, practice managers play a pivotal role in ensuring staff have the skills to navigate key administrative and financial transactions

This month, we continue exploring the 20 essential digital tasks outlined in the Future Dot Now roadmap – a strategic guide designed to help businesses and organisations close the digital literacy gap. Our attention now turns to the third category: transacting, a vital function for maintaining efficiency in any healthcare setting.

For practice managers, transacting digitally is a fundamental aspect of their role, ensuring the smooth operation of administrative and financial tasks.

This includes two key areas:

Completing digital records within the organisation: This covers essential administrative functions such as managing absence records, processing timesheets, submitting expenses and handling tax returns.

Accessing tax and salary information digitally: Employees should be able to view and manage their payroll details, including digital payslips and P60s, to streamline financial transparency and efficiency.

While not every practice employee may need to perform all these transactional tasks, understanding them within the context of their role is essential. A strong grasp of these digital processes helps improve efficiency, reduce administrative errors and support compliance with financial regulations. Practice managers play a crucial role in ensuring that staff members are confident and capable when using these systems.

Here’s how they can support digital skill development in their practices:

Creating Clear Step-By-Step Guides

Creating clear, step-by-step guides or short video tutorials can help staff navigate common digital processes with ease. By providing straightforward instructions on tasks like accessing payroll details or pension information online, practices can reduce confusion, increase staff confidence and promote self-sufficiency in managing financial records.

Encouraging a Digital-First Mindset

Highlighting the advantages of digital transactions – such as increased efficiency, time savings and improved accuracy in record-keeping – can help staff see the value of these systems. By demonstrating how digital tools simplify administrative tasks and reduce paperwork, practice managers can encourage employees to adopt new processes with confidence rather than resist change.

Ensuring Access to User-Friendly Systems

Collaborating with IT teams to ensure that practice finance and HR software are user-friendly, accessible and well-integrated into daily operations is essential for smooth adoption. Practice managers can work closely with IT professionals to assess the usability of these systems, identify potential challenges and implement necessary improvements.

For practice managers, ensuring that staff can confidently navigate digital transactions is a key step toward building a more efficient and digitally literate workforce. By supporting colleagues in developing these skills, practices can streamline administrative processes, enhance financial transparency and foster a culture of digital confidence.

In our next article, we will move on to Category Four: Digital Problem-Solving – exploring how practices can empower staff to troubleshoot technical issues, navigate digital tools effectively and develop problem-solving skills that enhance efficiency and productivity.