Admin is a necessary part of life, particularly if you’re a small business owner or entrepreneur. However, you needn’t spend excessive amounts of time on submitting forms, computing data, and compiling spreadsheets. By streamlining your admin, you can spend more time on critical tasks and use your talents where they’re needed most. To get started, take a look at these four handy tips and start saving time on basic admin tasks now:
Monitoring staff performance, progress, and absences is an important way of optimizing employee engagement and identifying potential issues, but it often takes an inordinate amount of time. With HR software for small businesses from Myhrtoolkit, however, you can simplify day-to-day HR functions and increase transparency throughout your workforce management. As Myhrtoolkit is HR software designed for SMEs, this means you gain access to the features you need to maximize small business operations, including holiday management, absence management, pay and benefits, task management, and much, much more.
Preparing end-of-year accounts can be a time-consuming and stressful task, especially if you don’t have the right protocols in place throughout the year. When you’re scrambling around looking for receipts or trying to calculate expenditure days before the deadline, you’re far more likely to forget legitimate deductions too.
Luckily, automating your bookkeeping and accounting is an easy way to track financial transactions and ensure your books are kept up to date. As well as being ready for filing at the end of the tax year, keeping your financial management up to date will enable you to access real-time fiscal data that can enhance your decision-making as a business owner.
If customers or clients aren’t paying their invoices on time, you could spend a considerable amount of time chasing them for payment. In addition to dealing with disrupted cash flow, you’ll waste excess time trying to resolve the situation. Getting paid on time starts with incorporating the right clauses into your contracts. Some small business owners negotiate a sliding scale of increasing fees when invoices are paid late, for example, but why stop there?
Rather than tracking and chasing individual invoices, use payment platforms and software to monitor and action late payments. With automated emails and reminders, you’ll spend less time chasing payments and more time managing a healthy cash flow. When payments aren’t forthcoming, you can even outsource debt management to external specialists to avoid clogging up your own diary with laborious admin tasks.
Successfully managing your inventory can be complex, but it doesn’t have to be. Product lifecycle management (PLM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and inventory management software solutions provide an easy way to streamline this aspect of your business. As a result, you’ll gain access to accurate, up-to-date data and spend significantly less time monitoring, tracking, and recording inventories.
Business owners often overlook the labor intensity of administrative tasks, which is why they end up taking longer than they need to. With a proactive strategy in place, however, you can find the right tools to simplify and streamline your business admin. By doing so, you can optimize your data management, comply with relevant regulations, and give yourself more time to focus on critical business areas.
