5 Tips for Getting Your Small Business Organized
Organization can be a challenge; especially if you're a newly minted woman entrepreneur or mompreneur, and you have a zillion things going on at every waking hour. Getting some of your backend business processes organized can help save you time and headaches when it comes to working on your business. After all, you want more time to do the stuff you love - right?
Here are 5 tips for getting your small business organized:
Streamline your invoicing. If you're still creating your own invoices in a Word Document, exporting them to PDF, attaching them to an email and typing out an email to your client with said invoice...you have to find a better way! There are a ton of different tools out there - here are a couple you might want to check out:
Harvest is commonly used among freelancers and offers time tracking and invoicing capabilities. Pricing starts at $12 per month and they offer a free 30-day trial.
Quickbooks not only helps with your invoicing process but also helps with all of your bookkeeping needs, making all that tax prep work a lot easier. Pricing starts at $25 per month and they usually run a promotion to give you a discount on your first few months.
Set up a social media process. Social media is one of the top complaints I hear from women entrepreneurs. It can be challenging to come up with what you're going to post, when you'll post it and how to figure out if all the time and energy is worth it. I highly recommend coming up with a content calendar to plan out your posts and work to schedule out at least 2 weeks in advance to give yourself a buffer. You can read more social media tips for women entrepreneurs here.
Get a planner that works for you. The best planner is the one you use - really. I can tell you that I've tried out a bunch of different tools but when it comes down to it, nothing beats my hardcopy agenda and Google calendar. I like my hardcopy paper book so I can easily see a monthly view of what I have on my plate and also a daily checklist of what I need to get done for my clients and for myself. I'm also a huge fan of color-coding to differentiate between business, personal and family stuff. My Google Calendar is what I use for booking meetings with clients and blocking off time that I am unavailable to meet. I always make sure that my Google Calendar events clearly state how I'm attending those meetings - whether it's a phone number or Zoom link, you want to make sure all the details are included so you're not scrambling come meeting time.
Get your digital files organized. It's so easy to let files pile up on your desktop or that pesky downloads folder. Cleaning up and cleaning out will help you save time when you're looking for documents, and brainpower when you see a nice clean desktop every time you turn on your computer. Name files so that you can easily find them when searching, and set up a folder structure to keep things neat and tidy. Setting aside 30 minutes each month to do your digital housekeeping will save you tenfold (in time and energy) in the long run.
Sort papers and mail as they come in. I don't know about you but paper clutter on my desk and around my house drives me NUTS! Having a system to sort paperwork as it comes in can help save your sanity and increase your efficiency. Even a simple 3 tray sorter can help sort your papers into categories like Filing, Bills to Pay, and Other To Do. This way you can take a stack of similar papers and tackle a bunch of the same task at once instead of constantly switching between tasks which sucks up more time and energy.
This certainly isn't an exhaustive list but it touches on some of the common challenges I hear from women entrepreneurs. If you'd like to set up a free 15 minute consultation to talk about your organizational and efficiency challenges, book a time to chat.