Every entrepreneur hates spending valuable time plugging away at administrative tasks. While you didn’t start a business for the tedious day-to-day work, those frustrating tasks are necessary for keeping your company afloat. The good news is that you can delegate, outsource, and automate nearly every administrative task that’s stealing your time away from the projects you’re passionate about. As a bonus, you’ll gain access to expertise and efficiency upgrades that can help your business run even better!
Many small business owners struggle with financial planning. In fact, cash flow issues are the number one reason small businesses fail!
Cibunet shares some other actionable tips to help you streamline those administrative burdens.
Employee Payroll
Paying employees can eat up a lot of your time, especially if your team members work different hours. A solid payroll process will ensure your employees always get paid the correct amount on time, and can also help you avoid violating labor laws. Take advantage of efficient payroll tools like the QuickBooks timesheet calculator so you can start time card tracking like a BOSS. Just remember to include overtime and breaks to ensure employee wages comply with labor laws. Failure to pay overtime can result in a costly labor lawsuit!
Cash Flow Considerations
Good cash flow management will ensure you always have cash on hand to pay your employees—and all those other expenses. Monitoring cash flow is vital to the success of your business. Even if you’re making sales and reporting revenue, your business can go under if you don’t have the cash to pay your bills. If business financials aren’t your strong suit, consider outsourcing your cash flow management to a professional accountant. A great accountant will help you with cash flow reporting, financial risk management, budgeting, and cash flow forecasting so you can stay on top of your business’s financial position.
Managing Invoices
Staying on top of client invoices is essential for maintaining positive cash flow. Without an efficient invoicing process, it can take a very long time for your business to receive money from customers. Implement invoicing strategies to ensure you get paid as fast as possible! For example, you can use automated invoicing tools to schedule payment reminders for customers and enable automatic payments for recurring invoices.
If you have a lot of cash tied up in unpaid invoices, invoice factoring can help you access working capital to pay your bills. Invoice factoring involves selling your accounts receivable to a factoring company that will assume the role of collecting unpaid invoices from your customers.
Inventory Management
Good inventory management is another important element in maintaining positive cash flow. While inventory has the power to generate cash flow, overstocking inventory that exceeds customer demand will tie up your cash in unsellable stock. On the other hand, understocking will leave your business short on sellable items, also hurting your potential cash flow. This is another area that can benefit from automation. Take advantage of inventory management software that will offer accurate inventory tracking and forecasting so you can avoid creating cash flow issues.
Customer Support
Handling customer inquiries and support tickets is an incredibly important administrative task and one that has the potential to become a huge time sink. To streamline customer support, Talkroute suggests using support ticket software to organize inquiries and delegate tasks to team members. Encourage your customers to find solutions on their own before reaching out for support. A library of user-friendly resources and FAQs can help cut down on customer inquiries and free up your time for more complex customer issues.
As an entrepreneur, it’s easy to get lost in your long-term goals. Dreaming about the future of your business is a great way to stay motivated! But don’t neglect the small day-to-day details that keep your business running smoothly. While no one likes administrative tasks, these tedious responsibilities are vital to your long-term success!
Article is by James Hall
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