There’s big money to made from data. Yet everyday most businesses create masses of it and instead of collecting and using it, let it all go to waste.

Some are put off by the fact that solutions for gathering, tracking, and crunching it come at a cost. However, as they can help your business save significant sums of money from the moment they’re installed, in reality, it’s an incredibly small price to pay.

The key is in knowing what data you should collect and how you can put it to use. These are some of the things we’re going to explore as we look at four money-saving tracking solutions for your business.

1. Business Intelligence

Data has been called the oil of the 21st century. But as mentioned, if you don’t know how collect, track, and process that data, then it’s as good as useless.

As well as from your customers, market, and industry, one of the places data comes from is your employees. You can use a mobile tracking solution to gather insights from your employees — insights that have been, until recently, impossible to know. As a result, you can spot trends, find weaknesses, and ultimately make changes to improve your operations and outstrip the competition.

2. GPS Data

When managing a team that’s based remotely or running operations that involve a lot of driving and logistics, vehicle tracking solutions can save you tonnes of time and money.

The major benefits are clear: you can monitor where your employees are at any given time and make sure everything is running smoothly and punctually. However, there are many other advantages, such as being able to track braking, idling, acceleration, and average speed, that all add up to help improve fuel-efficiency and reduce spending.

3. Social Media Sentiment

The power of social media is not in the posting, but in the data it creates. As such, much of the benefits to be gained from social media for businesses depends on the data analytics tools you use.

One powerful social media management tool is sentiment analysis technology. Such social listening tools take your engagement stats and measure and report on the collective feels and emotions that are you are eliciting from your audience. Such values fall under three categories — positive, negative, and neutral — and can be used to help your business get more in tune with your customers and industry influencers.

4. Financial Data

It makes sense that keeping tabs on your finances would be one of the best money-saving tracking solutions around. And this is exactly why businesses that deal in financial data are some of the most lucrative in the world.

Tracking your finances is clearly beneficial for sticking to budgets and managing cash flow. But the real advantages come when you use historical information across various financial accounts, departments, businesses, and even industries, to inform future decisions. Such data builds the basis of financial trends and can help provide insights into market ups and downs, consumer behaviour, and resource consumption — saving you even more time and money.