If you’re exiting the beta stage of your business and entering the growth-phase, maximum efficiency is critical for survival. Your ability to focus on complex tasks and build your business the right way will depend largely on how much time you spend (or waste) on the little things.
Rather than dedicating half of your working day to replying to emails, monitoring assets, or chasing leads, you should be focused on taking your operation to the next level.
Fortunately, modern technology has allowed even the smallest businesses to access automation tools that will save you time, money, and clients. Here are five simple things that every small business should automate in 2019.
1. Marketing & Communication
This one is arguably the most time-consuming task, which is why it is important to automate it as much as possible. If you take your time to reply individually to every email you receive or you write up your social media newsletters from scratch, you’re wasting precious time. A full 80% of high-performing companies use some form of marketing automation, be it email automation software like Customer.io or Twitter automation tools such as Hootsuite and HubSpot.
2. Trading Activities
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3. Report Writing
No one in business enjoys writing reports. Expense reports, sales reports, strategy reports, quarterly reports, the list goes on. You can avoid some of the tedium by using report automation platforms such as Looker and Zoho Analytics. All you need is the core information for your report. Once you’ve entered it into the platform, it will quickly generate a beautiful, interactive report that you can share with all of your key stakeholders in an instant.
4. Invoicing
Invoicing and payroll are not only immensely time-consuming but also fraught with potential legal pitfalls. An incorrect invoice or an inaccurate tax return can sink a small business, which is why it is better to leave this task in the hands of robots. You can outsource your accounting wholesale, or you can use accounting automation platforms such as Quickbooks that will allow you to instantly generate payslips, tax returns, expense claims, and invoices with total accuracy.
5. Recruitment
A business lives or dies by the talent it can attract. Recruitment is a hugely important step for business growth, but there are a lot of parts of the process which can be automated, without the quality of your recruitment strategy having to suffer. Popular tools such as Ideal use artificial intelligence to help you screen candidates, make offers, and generate job listings in just a few minutes. This is a top-notch way to get the talent you need without getting distracted.
All of the tools listed here are either free or low-cost, meaning that even the smallest businesses can budget for them. The time saved by automation will ensure these tools pay for themselves and then some.