A lot of people consider automation as a job killer, but for small businesses it’s life saver. It helps simplify daily tasks both saving you time and money. By automating these 10 tasks, it can save you at least an hour a day.
- Accounting, invoices and taxes
For small business owners, this is something we always dread, accounting and sorting out invoices as it’s both tedious and time consuming. However, thanks to automation, this is an area which you no longer need to dread.
There are numerous online invoicing services that automate bookkeeping tasks, from recurring payments, payment reminders, storing of receipts, real-time financial alerts, bank transfers and even filing your taxes.
Instead of manually inputting all this information, automation handles all of the bookkeeping needs. This therefore helps save you a lot of time and headaches when it comes to tax season.
- Social media updates
Interacting and engaging with your customers though social media is a must for a small business owner. But posting and responding to content can be a lot more time consuming than expected. However, thanks to tools like Buffer and Hootsuite, you can schedule social media updates in advance so you can instead focus on more current pressing matters.
Other tools such as Commun.it and Paper.li help identify and reach out to social media followers and automatically send messages such as ‘thank you’ to new followers.
- Website logins
A lot of business owners will have multiple login information for various financial, social media and vendor accounts. That’s quite a number of passwords they have to remember. Thankfully, password managers help simplify this problem.
Password managers aren’t just for convenience, April Glaser of Wired Magazine stated, “Most password managers save and generate secure passwords for you, meaning you only have one password to remember – the one that opens your vault.”
- Data backup
You never know when your computer might crash on you, meaning you could lose most, if not all your data.
But now with the Cloud as an option, it can now rectify quite a major problem if it did arise. You can now back up all your data on the Cloud, meaning if there was a problem you could recover anything important that could’ve been lost.
- Filling online forms
Software programs like Roboform let you automatically fill in online forms. By using your stored information such as your name, address and billing information, it allows for you to fly through subscribing to emails, downloading content and signing up to new services.
It might not sound like it’s a big deal, but constantly having to fill in your information can be time consuming, and having this software can help you save time.
- Employee scheduling
Are you still scheduling employees with a pen and paper, or an excel spreadsheet? These two methods are both very time consuming.
Tools such as Hubworks and When I Work automatically balance employees’ availability with your scheduling availability, saving a lot of time.
- Email marketing
Email marketing, if not done efficiently, can be a time-consuming responsibility if you’re responding to every email you receive.
Mailchimp, Aweber and Drip offer services such as launch sequences, welcome messages, wishing customers a happy birthday, post purchase follow-ups and abandon cart recovery.
- Business analytics reporting
You probably spend a lot of your time switching from different business dashboards without even realising how time consuming it is. Cyfe is a tool which brings all your dashboards into one, where you can monitor everything from analytics, marketing, sales, social media and customer support.
- Customer support
Salesforce help desk is an automated tool that give you the chance to handle out-of-hours support, improve conversations, pre-emptively address and questions or concerns, reduce the teams’ workload and assist customers with their problems as soon as possible.
- Payroll
Services such as Gusto and Wagepoint cannot completely automate your payroll, but they do help with tasks such as employee on-boarding and tax filing.
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