How much do your clients pay you for every hour you spend on invoicing them, chasing up payments, or running payroll for your team? The answer is absolutely nothing. The administration of a business provides no value to clients and should be minimised. Using the right technology can significantly increase the opportunity for business owners to either grow their business or focus their own needs.
Time is our most precious commodity. No matter your position in life, we all get the same 24 hours to live on any given day. Time must be diverted to growth areas. Recognising that administration must be taken care of, I wish to share three fundamental techniques for a business to reduce time spent on ‘back end’ tasks:
1. Ditch the paperwork
The days of needing anything physically on paper are almost at an end. There are now very rare occasions where it is necessary to acquire signatures on an actual document with an actual pen. Almost everyone now must have an email address as a lot of essential services move online such as banking and bills.
Where possible, save on printing costs by communicating online. As an added benefit, you will always have a record of what was sent and when. Make it a habit to receive the client's email address in the initial stages of the engagement.
Sure, you can’t control a client or supplier giving you paper, but download an app like PDFElement and take a snap to convert to PDF. Paired with an online drive system, like Google Drive, you can file instantly for easy access from wherever you are.
2. Move to online invoicing
An online invoicing system is probably the most effective time-saving tool any business can use should they be currently doing this manually. We spoke earlier about the value of your time. Think about the hours spent on invoicing activities and calculate the value attributable to this. If your desired hourly rate is $100 per hour and you spend 8 hours per week working through invoicing, you are effectively forgoing $800. Alternatively, you might be giving up 8 hours that could be better spent with family, friends or at the beach.
Minimising time here is essential for any business owner to grow or focus on more rewarding areas of their life. Cloud-based accounting packages provide the biggest opportunity to cut time spent. Most packages have many other key time-saving functions such as payroll, superannuation, accounts payable and expense tracking. The scope to reduce workloads varies from business to business, but most businesses should see roughly a 50% or more reduction in wasted time.
Check out Xero as a recommended package. Sandstone Advisory is a Xero Silver Partner and would be happy to run clients through how it can work for your business. A $50pm subscription will cover the needs of most businesses. In our example above, if this saved 4 hours per week (or $400) you can easily see how it is one of the most important areas for a business owner to invest in.
3. Get someone else to do it
Paying someone else to do your work is a counterintuitive method to growing a business but a key area often overlooked. You are in business because you are good at something and there are people out there willing to pay you for your skill. There is no expectation from clients that you need to be good at everything. If creating furniture is your expertise, there’s no use trying to branch out into also being an expert bookkeeper or tax specialist.
We can often fall into the trap of trying to be a ‘Jack of all trades and a master of none’. Successful business owners recognise this and build a network of advisers to fill their knowledge gaps. In doing so, allowing them to focus on their strengths.
Don’t hesitate to build a relationship with an accountant or a bookkeeper who can support these areas of your business to free you up to focus on the bigger picture. Make sure they pass the ‘sleep at night’ test. That is, you should be able to hit the hay at night knowing they have you covered in these niche areas.
Sandstone Advisory is a boutique advisory and accounting service, providing agile professional support to business and individual clients across Australia. Reach out via the Contact Form if you are seeking support.
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