As difficult as starting up your own small business may be, ensuring it continues to run and keeps making a profit is even harder. Because of this, it would not be a surprise if your office, your computer, and maybe even your store itself are in a little bit of a jumble. It can be hard to complete a good spring clean when you have to manage every aspect of your own business, but it is essential if you want it to continue to run productively. Here are some easy steps to get your organization started.
Dump What You Don’t Need
The last thing you want is a cluttered store and office; It makes life harder for you when trying to find things, and looks unprofessional to your customers. You may think that everything you have is there because it’s important, but I assure you, a good portion of it won’t be. Make sure you get rid of anything broken or things you don’t know the use for (yes, that includes that meter long cable that you’ve had stashed in your drawer for months). Only keep the things you have used in the last year or so, anything other than that surely can’t be that important and can either be thrown away or donated.
Get Online
I assure you that you don’t need the receipt for your lunch six months ago, but even if you did, you certainly don’t need a paper copy. There is no need to have all of your receipts and paper stuffed into a filing cabinet, especially if it has absolutely no organization whatsoever. All this will accomplish is a lot of lost hours searching for a piece of paper that stuffed at the bottom of a drawer. Instead, scan and upload all of your papers and documents to the cloud, and shred the hard copies. This will ensure that you never lose a document again and will provide easy access to any employee that needs to see them. The six-month-old receipt mentioned earlier could easily be saved onto a receipt management app on your phone, such as https://www.receipt-bank.com/receipt-scanning-app/, just in case you need it at some point in the future.
Work Order Management Software
The right work order management software will not only get your business working more organized and efficiently, but it can potentially save you money too. Work order management software, such as from https://www.optsy.com/work-order-management, will find a reputable contractor for any repair or maintenance requests that you may have, book and pay for these contractors quickly and easily when they’re required, and keep a record of your invoice for this contractor’s job. This, once again, will reduce the amount of paper in your office, and will ensure you always have a copy of your invoice, if you ever need it.
Purge Your Email Inbox
Often the messiest place in your business is the inbox for emails. It could be filled to the brim with newsletters we don’t read, correspondence we don’t respond to, and dodgy looking emails about laser eye surgery, and you still leave it to get worse. Why? Because organizing your inbox it a lot of effort, for such a boring task. But boring or not, it’s necessary, otherwise, you are at risk of an important email falling through the cracks in the future. Start off by going through and archiving emails that you know you should probably keep. Once that’s done, you can get to work deleting everything else. Make sure to unsubscribe from any subscriptions or newsletters that you never bother to read as you go. You might even want to make folders for emails regarding different aspects of your business, or one for important emails, and one for unimportant emails, so that you ensure you check the important ones most frequently.
Give Your Social Media A Tidy Up
There’s no point in you clearing out your emails if you’re just going to get more and more from your three different Facebook pages, two Instagrams, and four Twitter profiles. When starting up your own small business, many people go through several different social media accounts before deciding they have enough followers, like their profile picture, and have the right biography paragraph. However, this doesn’t mean you need to keep all of the old, unused ones. If you do have accounts you don’t use, even if they are the only one of their kind, such as a single Tumblr blog, for example, there is absolutely no point in keeping them, so delete them instead. They’re not helping your business in the slightest, and in fact, could have followers that don’t realize that they don’t follow the most recent and active account. You could also unfollow any accounts that don’t follow you back, using a tool like ManageFlitter, so that your timeline isn’t filled non-customers.
Ensure You’re Completely Legal
While you’re clearing out and organizing the rest of your business, it’s also a good time to ensure that you’ve also completed all of your legal requirements for the year. Meet with a tax advisor to ensure that you have all of your tax returns in order, check you have all of the permits and licenses required by your local council, and fill out a DBA (Doing Business As ) form if you haven’t already. It would also probably be a good idea to remind yourself of your insurance policies and check employee laws to make sure that you’re up to date on everything that you need to know as an employer and as a small business owner.
Hopefully, this short guide will help you to get your small business organized and working efficiently. You should know by now that starting up your own small business, and ensuring it continues to grow and thrive every month is no easy task, and organizing your business won’t be either. But much like with starting up your business, the satisfaction you feel from a job well done will more than make up for any stress you had to endure while organizing your business.
