Starting a small business is exciting. You’ve finally decided to take the leap and turn your dream job into a reality. While there’s so much fun to be had in starting your own business, it’s important to set yourself up for success by getting your admin organised from day one. The nuts and bolts may not be the most glamorous side of things, but they can really power your success when handled in a thoughtful way.

Here are a few business processes you should consider putting in place when you start out, to help you thrive from day one:

Determine which business tasks you should automate

When you’re the wearer of many hats, it may not be long before you find yourself buried in admin and paperwork. Think early about which tasks can be automated, rather than handled manually.

Once you start researching what can be automated, you’ll find there’s a tool for everything, but that doesn’t mean you should automate everything. Where personal touch or creativity is involved, skip the automation. Do consider automating tasks like reminding customers about upcoming appointments, or that a payment is due. If you’re constantly on the road, mileage logging can be automated with MileIQ.

Go digital with your paperwork from the start

Using digital tools to manage the backend of your business has numerous benefits – from keeping you automatically organised and giving you better visibility over how your business is performing, to allowing you more flexibility to manage your business from anywhere.

Everything from your estimates to invoices, expenses, and payments can be managed with mobile apps like Invoice2go. You can also take photos of all the receipts your business collects as you go, and save them in one location to keep you tax time ready all year long.

Get set up so you can accept online payments

There’s nothing worse than performing a great service for someone, then having to tell them you don’t take their preferred payment method at the end. Taking online payments is incredibly straightforward these days, and you can get set up in a matter of minutes.

Making sure you’re ready to accept all the ways your customers want to pay is a simple way to ensure you’re meeting your customers expectations, and puts a professional foot forward from the first impression, all the way to the end. 

Keep track of how you spend your time

No matter your industry, keeping track of where your time is being spent is a great habit to get into. Not only can this help you discover the times of the day you’re most productive, but also hidden time-saps.

Once you’ve tracked your time, take a look at what you’re spending it on, and look at where your priorities lie. By identifying tasks that take up a lot of your time, you can determine where they lie on your priority list. If the task is essential but can be outsourced or simplified using a tool, consider investing in a contractor or tool that can save you time. Remember that time is money, so while an initial investment may seem scary, it will free up your time to do the more important jobs and bring in more business!

Get organised with your phone

Having access to your organisational tools in the palm of your hand helps you stay across all the moving parts of your business, no matter where you are. According to research from Invoice2go, 55 per cent of small business owners run their business entirely from their smartphone. Why not see how much time it can save you?

Set up some basics like your calendar and task list, then search the Apple or Google Play app stores and find out what apps can help your business. There’s a lot of benefit to staying organised and productive as you go, rather than waiting until the end of your day to get down to the admin side of things.

With so many tech tools available to small business owners, you can set up comprehensive admin processes from the palm of your hand, so it doesn’t need to be a strain. Just set aside the time to do it early on, and you will thank yourself later.