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Relational vs Non-Relational Databases | What's the Difference?

Getting your data model right is the first step in any successful development or transformation project. Today, we’re exploring everything you need to know about relational vs non-relational databases. This has become a tougher decision in the past decade or so. Until relatively recently, the relational model was pretty much the dominant way of storing data. Today, it’s still by far the most ubiquitous option - but other approaches have also entered the mainstream.

Ronan McQuillan

Apr 21, 2023

What is Finance Process Transformation?

Finance transformation is one of the most common classes of digital transformation. The reason for this is pretty straightforward. Your finance team is made up of skilled professionals. However, arguably more than any other department, they’re also massively overburdened with repetitive, menial, and largely avoidable administrative tasks. This - plus the need for a high degree of speed and accuracy - makes financial processes the ideal candidate for digital transformation.

Ronan McQuillan

Apr 17, 2023

What is Process Innovation?

Process innovation is all about coming up with new, better ways to carry out everyday internal tasks. Nowadays, this primarily means innovating with new technologies - although this is by no means the only option. Indeed, we’ll see today that we have levers to pull across our wider operations, company culture, governance, training, HR, finance, and more. But of course, technology will still almost inevitably play a role within each of these verticals.

Ronan McQuillan

Apr 17, 2023

Creating an Employee Management App | 6-Step Guide

Today, we’re going to run through how to build a relatively simple but no less powerful tool - an employee management app using Budibase. Your employees - along with their skills, knowledge, and expertise - are some of your most valuable assets. Therefore, making better use of their time is one of the easiest ways to create huge efficiency savings. And for that, we need proper oversight. Who is doing what - and when?

Ronan McQuillan

Apr 6, 2023

Webhook vs API | In-Depth Guide

APIs and webhooks are both central to the way modern web apps, automation solutions, and integrated software stacks are built. However, there are several important distinctions in their use cases, configuration, architecture, target personas, and limitations. Today, we’re diving deep into webhooks vs APIs. We’re going to cover everything you need to know about how each one work, what kinds of projects they’re suitable for, technical barriers, practical considerations, costs/benefits, and more.

Ronan McQuillan

Apr 6, 2023

What is Data Automation? In-Depth Guide

Data automation is one of the most transformative strategies that your business can turn to. Separately, data and automation are two of the biggest priorities for modern business IT leaders. So, it follows quite naturally that automated data processing offers enormous benefits - for IT teams, on-the-ground employees, and the organization as a whole. Today, we’re going to dive deep into everything you need to know. We’ll start by covering the basics, including what automated data processing is, what it looks like in practice, and what it achieves.

Ronan McQuillan

Mar 30, 2023

What is Invoice Automation? + 4 Examples

Invoice automation is one of the real unsung heroes in the world of process improvement. See, it’s not the most attention-grabbing topic, but the potential for efficiency savings here is enormous. The crux of the matter is that processing invoices costs a lot of money - and it just doesn’t need to. Your accounts and finance teams are skilled professionals, but they’re also some of the most likely to be overburdened by totally unnecessary admin tasks.

Ronan McQuillan

Mar 30, 2023

Experimenting with RPA & Low-Code for CRUD Development

We’ve been having a little in-house debate about combining RPA tools and low-code development - that we decided to put to the test. Basically, we ran an experiment to see if we can answer two questions: Can we get an RPA tool to build low-code apps? Would anyone ever actually want to do that? See, at their core, low-code and RPA are both meant to save you time - but the tradeoff is that you sacrifice some of the flexibility that you’d get with doing things the old-fashioned way - either performing a task manually or coding an equivalent solution from scratch.

Ronan McQuillan

Mar 20, 2023