You’re an entrepreneur because you love what you do. But do you also love all of the time-heavy admin that comes with running a business? If you’re reading this article, I’m guessing your answer is: not likely.
Thankfully there’s a whole industry of apps designed to save you from having to manage the more mundane business tasks.
I’ve shared a few below that have been helpful in automating parts of my own business, both as a freelancer and as an employee. Pick and choose the ones that are most helpful to you, automate those boring tasks, and you’ll have more time to focus on the parts of your business you enjoy.
Business Email and Customer FAQ
Stop letting your inbox dominate your schedule. It’s distracting. Here are some processes and solutions to help you automate and decrease the time you spend on email.
Inbox by Google: The Gmail team just announced Inbox. Still in invite-only phase, it promises to revolutionize your inbox and give you the ability to focus on what’s important. If that appeals to you, email [email protected] to request an invite.
SaneBox: If you’re drowning in email overload, SaneBox is an app that keeps your inbox clean. It prioritizes email and moves anything deemed ‘unimportant’ to a new folder that you can browse through later.
UnRoll.Me: This is an awesome app that scans your inbox for emails you’ve subscribed to, then sends them to you in a single daily email digest. It also has an unsubscribe with one-click feature – great for mass-unsubscribing to email lists you no longer need.
Responding to Customers vs Non Customers: In her article ‘11 things I wish I knew before starting my business’, Life and Guidance Consultant Stephanie St. Claire shares a great process for quickly identifying customers vs non-customers and responding in a way that saves time:
“(As a business owner) your inbox will explode. You care about everyone, but you can’t help everyone. Read: Not everyone is your customer. Your inbox will be a jumble of people who want to say thank you, people who want free stuff, and people who want your services. Your job is to quickly discern who’s who and respond in the most appropriate way.
Shorten the email back-and-forth as quickly as possible with people that are your potential clients. If your business is a consultancy where you are selling your time, I recommend having two form letters on hand that you can customize to the occasion: one for your potential customer and the other for your not potential customer.
Your Customer: Acknowledge their situation, request, or problem and invite them to a 20-minute call. Include your available dates, times, and a phone number where you can be reached.
Not Your Customer: Acknowledge their situation, request, problem and direct them to other resources, practitioners, blogs, or articles that would be a splendid fit for them.” (Read Stephanie’s full article here.)
Bookkeeping and Accounting
Members of Reddit’s /r/entrepreneur subreddit recently voted bookkeeping and accounting as the most important thing to outsource. Why? Because unless you’re a number-lovin’ entrepreneur, it’s one of those mandatory tasks that will take you an inordinate amount of time (and probably stress) to complete.
Your options for automating accounting and bookkeeping include using accounting software to self-manage your business’ books (somewhat automated) or outsourcing the process entirely to an online bookkeeping service (fully automated).
This simple process for automating your accounting from efficiency consultant Chris Ronzio is the closest I’ve come to seeing someone fully automate their accounting and bookkeeping. It’ll take some time to set up, but once everything’s in place Chris says he uses it to save 5-10 hours per month on bookkeeping and accounting tasks alone.
If you’re a business with a physical location, you can even go the old fashioned route and hire someone to come in and handle your bookkeeping on site 1-2 days per week. Of course you’ll still need to be involved in some parts of the process, such as filing your receipts properly and reading your monthly income statements.
Whichever automation method you choose is up to you. The goal is to automate as much of the process as you possibly can. Find a method where your bookkeeping and accounting are in good hands and, most importantly, not taking up a lot of your time.
Storing and Filing Receipts
Send Shoeboxed your receipts and they’ll turn them into digitized, searchable data. What does that mean? It means you send a company your receipts, they scan and store them for you, and you can search your receipts digitally. No more scrounging around in filing cabinets for last month’s business expenses.
Shoeboxed also has functions to manage business cards and create expense reports. Well worth checking out if you struggle to organize your business expenses.
Research, Data Entry, Booking Appointments, Travel Arrangements
Smaller tasks like these are best left to someone else. When it comes to data entry, research, and booking appointments – outsource, outsource, outsource!
Zirtual offers a low-cost monthly plan for entrepreneurs, which connects you to a U.S. based Z.A. (Zirtual Assistant). If you’re not at the stage where you need a full time virtual assistant to support your business, Fancy Hands is a virtual assistant service that offers monthly plans on a per-request basis.
A note on this process: A virtual assistant will ultimately take tasks off your hands and save you time in the long run, but the integration process is much the same as hiring a new full time team member: you’ll need to train them. Dorie Clarke wrote a good, quick guide on preparing your business prior to hiring a V.A. Read the tips and do the work. It’ll save you money and unnecessary stress.
Team Communication
Slack: Slack is a team-chat app. I use it both when I’m in the office and when I’m working remotely. When I’m in the office, using Slack saves me from interrupting a colleague’s workflow with a poorly timed tap on the shoulder or a phone call. Group chats within Slack also create greater transparency across teams.
Skype: An oldie but a goodie. Skype also functions well as an instant messaging/chat platform for teams.
Google Hangouts: Integrates well if you use Gmail and Google Drive for business. Hangouts are a quick way to host video conference calls.
Bloomfire: If you tend to answer the same questions over and over again, you need Bloomfire. This app helps you to store everything from meeting notes, sales reports, best practices, and style guides for your business in a centralized location that’s accessible by all members of your business. Any employee with access to your company’s Bloomfire account can search and access the information. In essence, Bloomfire becomes your business’ very own Wikipedia – an easily searchable resource of everything relevant to your company.
Saving Passwords
1Password: this app generates secure passwords and saves them in a single account. All you need to remember is a single master password to log into your 1Password account. From there, 1Password securely generates, stores, and auto-fills passwords when you need them.
I did the math once to estimate how much time 1Password was saving me. I was shocked.
I have around 40+ logins (and counting!) that I access on a weekly basis. For argument’s sake let’s say that it would take me 5 minutes each day to manually enter passwords for existing accounts and generate and store passwords for new accounts.
If 1Password saves me 5 minutes a day, then that’s 25 minutes saved each week and 1300 minutes (21 hours) I personally save each year. Multiply that 21 hours by the 100 employees that work at Bench and, company wide, we’re saving 2100 hours (262 8-hour work days!) per year thanks to a single app.
Manage Your Files in The Cloud
If your business files are still anchored to a single computer, you’re doing things the old fashioned way.
Storing my files in the cloud allows me to access, send, and collaborate on work no matter where I am. It also gives me access to work files via three different computers (work laptop, work desktop, personal laptop). When I’m part of a team, cloud storage saves me from downloading, attaching, and emailing documents. It also reduces error when everyone is working from the same centralized document.
Here are the cloud based file management systems I use to save time:
Google Drive: We mostly use Google Docs which allows us to access documents from any computer. Some people at the office work with both an iMac and a MacBook Air. Using Google Docs allows us to work remotely and not worry about which computer a file was on.
Dropbox: Similar to Google Docs, we store all company resources in shared files, and individual employees can access what they need no matter where they are working.
OneDrive: Microsoft’s answer to Google Drive. Personally I prefer using OneDrive as it closely resembles Microsoft Office. It’s a personal preference though, and if you’re collaborating with a team I’d advise that you use the same cloud file storage system as the rest of your team mates.