As any small business owner will tell you; each day is filled with a seemingly impossible amount of tasks and not much time to do them. In the midst of filling orders, booking clients, managing employees or anything else your day might bring you, it’s likely that bookkeeping is pretty low on the list. Most business owners will reserve this task once a week, once a month, or worse. This however, is a mistake. Keeping your books up to date, filing receipts and documents and generally tracking everything your business does on a regular basis will end up saving you time and headache. It may seem like a massive workload, which is why many businesses of many sizes use various workflow software solutions to increase efficiency on tasks that can ultimately be automated, increasing speeds while decreasing the likelihood of errors and missed work deadlines.
Tax Season is a breeze
Businesses take a lot of tax deductions, if yours doesn’t, it certainly should. Often times, these deductions cannot take place without the proper records. Unfortunately, solid bookkeeping and bank statements aren’t enough. The IRS really likes receipts, like really likes them. In fact, in order to deduct any business expense, a proper receipt is required.
Now before you pull out that old cardboard box to start stuffing your receipts into, realise that this is almost just as bad as throwing them away. Once you actually need to find one of those receipts, make sure it’s easy to do so. Companies like Neat offer scanners that will read your receipt or document and automatically sort it into the proper file. If this is out of your budget, you can still snap a quick photo with your phone and send it to yourself to be filed away. Digital files are much easier to keep track of, will keep clutter to a minimum and so much easier to reproduce once needed. Always write on your receipts including the date, reason for purchase, etc.
2. Tracking Your Employees is best done digitally
Tracking your employees is the best way to ensure that your business is running smoothly & your team is being productive. Staying on top of hours worked, jobs completed, task progress and more is a vital part of staying in touch. A time clock app may help to keep track of the employee working hours and making sure they’re working their contracted hours. Doing so the old fashion such as written time cards, manual way can be a huge hassle and result in more of a waste of time than it’s worth. However, digitally tracking employees can be a hugely effective and save time for yourself and your team. Using something like a mileage tracker for business expense tracking could be a good solution to staying on top of it all.
Why should you demand employees track attendance and hours? Keeping detailed attendance records feeds directly into your payroll needs. Digitally tracking clock-in and clock-out is easy to do for employees and cuts out the need for timely timesheet creation. Handlr is a great way to integrate this process into your workplace. Handlr tracks employee clock-in as well as the clock-in/out for each service performed throughout the day.
When it comes to hiring and getting the best candidate for the position, be sure to choose someone who sparks passion, these are usually driven individuals and are most likely to hit targets that can allow you to hit the OKR and KPI effectively.
3. You might just be losing money without knowing it.
Invoicing is a huge, integral part of every business. Properly tracking your invoices and who owes you money seems like a no-brainer. Surprisingly, most small business owners consistently lose out on owed money due to poor invoicing practices.
Keeping detailed records of the kind of services you provided each client, how many hours were spent, which employee was on the job etc, will come in handy time and time again. Handlr is an easy solution for tracking all of this data and keeping it organized for future reference. This way, if a client ever has an issue, you can turn to the software to easily produce the data you need to show that the work was done correctly and in a timely manner. You can point to each hour the client is paying for if you have to.
