5 Must-Automate Tasks to Remove Work from Your Small Business Workflow
Being a small business owner is hard. Managing inventory, payables, receivables, tax filing, bookkeeping, payroll processing and a lot more are always on the table. In that rush, why not pass on the repetitive and grunt work to automation and spend time on business matters? Automation is not reserved for big enterprises. Most small to mid-sized businesses have started automating their workflow. And if you still haven’t, it is now your turn.
This read will throw light upon 5 things you should automate in your small business workflow to get better headspace to focus on things that need your presence.
E-mail Marketing and CRM
Customer relationship management is closely knit to customer retention. Small businesses usually have a limited customer base. In that light customer, retention adds a lion’s share to the sales. Marketing automation can be a great tool to manage your customer relationships.
The marketing automation tools fetch data from the CRM systems and send frequent and occasional marketing emails to existing and targeted potential customers. Nothing warms the customers more than a personalised email addressing their name. Such emails help you build a personal relationship with your customers by making them feel special. You can send thank you emails with their names along with the product-specific detail or tips for the purchased product to give them a personalized touch.
An email automation tool can be your saviour in this. You can automate sending customized messages on birthdays and special occasions, send maintenance reminders, notify them of the prevailing discounts, send them coupons and ask for feedback through emails.
Sending and responding to emails one by one takes a lot of time and involves ardent labour. But automation tools can send personalised emails to hundreds of customers in a flash. These tools allow you to automate emails and reply to the responses according to customer behaviour.
Bookkeeping and Manual Entry
About 40% of small business owners find bookkeeping and tax filing as the worst and least favourite part of owning a small business. It is generally held that small businesses spend roughly 80+ hours a year on tax filing, re-doing the numbers and working with accountants.
The most time eating and labour intensive task in bookkeeping is manual keying. However well-trained and vigilant the data entry person may be, manual keying inevitably has room for errors. Studies show that the average accuracy rate of manual data entry is 96 to 98%. It can be pushed to 99% with various practices like double entry. But, however tried, attaining 100% accuracy all the time is not possible. Inaccurate books may pull up headaches at the time of reconciliation and even big chunks of tax penalty.
But an automated bookkeeping tool can save you from this mess. The best way to automate your bookkeeping is by linking your payment system to your accounting software. By doing so, all your transactions along with other details will be directly recorded into your accounting software, without involving you in.
For instance, if you are using QuickBooks, instead of manually keying each transaction and details into it, you can try automating the numbers with third-party auto-import tools like PayTraQer. With that, you can sync all your ongoing transactions into QuickBooks automatically as they happen. As all the interaction happens between systems, you will get 100% accurate records all the time. Reconciliation and tax filing will run without any friction.
Recurring Invoices
Getting paid can be a serious and frustrating process. Recurring invoices can be significantly helpful if you run a gym, spa or any other business that offers monthly memberships and subscriptions. You can automate recurring invoices and get paid on time every month. These automated invoices take the stress out of your business. It prompts the customers to pay on time when they have forgotten.
You can even attach payment links that connect to the payment gateways in your automated invoices so that your customers do not have to toggle between platforms to pay your invoice. By automating your invoice, you can get paid faster.
Time Tracking and Payroll Processing
The next big day task next to tax preparation for small businesses is the payday. The small business owner had to burn the midnight oil, running over scattered records and doing a lot of calculations. As a small business owner, you may have slipped into the shoes of an HR manager. In that case, an automated time tracking and payroll system can be your saviour.
You can track the work hours and leaves with the time tracking applications, track vehicle mileages if you have delivery or other vehicle-related services with mileage trackers and automate the payroll calculations. However, you can review, approve and edit things of choice anytime.
Forecasting and Analysis
Regardless of your business size or niche, staying on top of your books is an absolute priority. Having a close eye on the financial health of your business will help you make better business decisions. But how can you predict your future cash flow while you have so many business things in the pipeline? That’s when forecasting and analysis applications flash in.
There are hundreds of forecasting tools to keep you posted on the financial happenings of your business. With these tools at hand, you can clearly look through the past, present and future financial status of your business. By doing so, you can plan for greater things in case of abundant cash flow and make necessary arrangements to patch up the looming financial gaps before they happen.
Wrap Up
Automation helps you get things done faster and more efficiently. It greatly helps you offload your repetitive and grunt work thereby adding a lot to the team’s productivity. If you automate major tasks like bookkeeping, e-mailing, invoices and payroll, you can sit back and watch the workflow run by itself.
So, if you are looking for ways to save time and resources, take up the call of automation and spend time just to manage your business.
Being a small business owner is hard. Managing inventory, payables, receivables, tax filing, bookkeeping, payroll processing and a lot more are always on the table. In that rush, why not pass on the repetitive and grunt work to automation and spend time on business matters? Automation is not reserved for big enterprises. Most small to mid-sized businesses have started automating their workflow. And if you still haven’t, it is now your turn.
This read will throw light upon 5 things you should automate in your small business workflow to get better headspace to focus on things that need your presence.
- E-mail Marketing and CRM
Customer relationship management is closely knit to customer retention. Small businesses usually have a limited customer base. In that light customer, retention adds a lion’s share to the sales. Marketing automation can be a great tool to manage your customer relationships.
The marketing automation tools fetch data from the CRM systems and send frequent and occasional marketing emails to existing and targeted potential customers. Nothing warms the customers more than a personalised email addressing their name. Such emails help you build a personal relationship with your customers by making them feel special. You can send thank you emails with their names along with the product-specific detail or tips for the purchased product to give them a personalized touch.
An email automation tool can be your saviour in this. You can automate sending customized messages on birthdays and special occasions, send maintenance reminders, notify them of the prevailing discounts, send them coupons and ask for feedback through emails.
Sending and responding to emails one by one takes a lot of time and involves ardent labour. But automation tools can send personalised emails to hundreds of customers in a flash. These tools allow you to automate emails and reply to the responses according to customer behaviour.
Bookkeeping and Manual Entry
About 40% of small business owners find bookkeeping and tax filing as the worst and least favourite part of owning a small business. It is generally held that small businesses spend roughly 80+ hours a year on tax filing, re-doing the numbers and working with accountants.
The most time eating and labour intensive task in bookkeeping is manual keying. However well-trained and vigilant the data entry person may be, manual keying inevitably has room for errors. Studies show that the average accuracy rate of manual data entry is 96 to 98%. It can be pushed to 99% with various practices like double entry. But, however tried, attaining 100% accuracy all the time is not possible. Inaccurate books may pull up headaches at the time of reconciliation and even big chunks of tax penalty.
But an automated bookkeeping tool can save you from this mess. The best way to automate your bookkeeping is by linking your payment system to your accounting software. By doing so, all your transactions along with other details will be directly recorded into your accounting software, without involving you in.
For instance, if you are using QuickBooks, instead of manually keying each transaction and details into it, you can try automating the numbers with third-party auto-import tools like PayTraQer. With that, you can sync all your ongoing transactions into QuickBooks automatically as they happen. As all the interaction happens between systems, you will get 100% accurate records all the time. Reconciliation and tax filing will run without any friction.
Recurring Invoices
Getting paid can be a serious and frustrating process. Recurring invoices can be significantly helpful if you run a gym, spa or any other business that offers monthly memberships and subscriptions. You can automate recurring invoices and get paid on time every month. These automated invoices take the stress out of your business. It prompts the customers to pay on time when they have forgotten.
You can even attach payment links that connect to the payment gateways in your automated invoices so that your customers do not have to toggle between platforms to pay your invoice. By automating your invoice, you can get paid faster.
Time Tracking and Payroll Processing
The next big day task next to tax preparation for small businesses is the payday. The small business owner had to burn the midnight oil, running over scattered records and doing a lot of calculations. As a small business owner, you may have slipped into the shoes of an HR manager. In that case, an automated time tracking and payroll system can be your saviour.
You can track the work hours and leaves with the time tracking applications, track vehicle mileages if you have delivery or other vehicle-related services with mileage trackers and automate the payroll calculations. However, you can review, approve and edit things of choice anytime.
Forecasting and Analysis
Regardless of your business size or niche, staying on top of your books is an absolute priority. Having a close eye on the financial health of your business will help you make better business decisions. But how can you predict your future cash flow while you have so many business things in the pipeline? That’s when forecasting and analysis applications flash in.
There are hundreds of forecasting tools to keep you posted on the financial happenings of your business. With these tools at hand, you can clearly look through the past, present and future financial status of your business. By doing so, you can plan for greater things in case of abundant cash flow and make necessary arrangements to patch up the looming financial gaps before they happen.
Wrap Up
Automation helps you get things done faster and more efficiently. It greatly helps you offload your repetitive and grunt work thereby adding a lot to the team’s productivity. If you automate major tasks like bookkeeping, e-mailing, invoices and payroll, you can sit back and watch the workflow run by itself.
So, if you are looking for ways to save time and resources, take up the call of automation and spend time just to manage your business.
