The running of a business can be difficult at times, it can be stressful and timeconsuming yet very rewarding. This means that it’s imperative for you to ensure the smooth running of your business. From successful controlling your business administration to managing your marketing activity, there are ways you can help to have these areas run smoothly and efficiently. Find just a few hours the look at these kinds of areas can save you time and improve your work-life balance.
Have a look below at some of the simple tasks you can complete in order to keep your business running smoothly:
Clear Out Your Inbox
You should look to spend one-two hours doing this in order to get it back in a manageable position. You’ll probably be able to hold your hands up and say that your inbox has seen better days. They can fill up quickly with junk, unread non-important mail and you probably have starred items that you haven’t even looked at yet. If you spend this time going over your inbox once a month you a sure to be able to keep on top of your email more easily. Some of the things to have a look at include:
- Delete any junk mail and unsubscribe, once you’ve done this you can unsubscribe as you receive any other mail throughout the month.
- Create files for each client and each sector of your business.
- Reply to any outstanding mail, then file it away in the folders you’ve created.
- Only have pending emails sitting in your inbox, clear them once they have been completed.
Be careful not to get too sucked in when going through your emails for the first time in a while. It can be really easy to get sidetracked and start to tackle each email as you come across it. Try to sort through your emails first, organize it and leave the emails that need attention in your inbox until you have completed your tidy up. If you know it’s going to take more than a few hours, allocated some time over a few days instead of trying to tackle it all on one. When you’re going through your emails you will start to notice things that need to be completed or tasks that may be overdue such as your audit, note these down and come back to tackle them. Read more about how important it is to keep on top of things like your audit.
Look At Your Bookkeeping
You should look to spend two-three hours looking at your bookkeeping. Again this is an area that is far too easy to lose control of. Even if you employ an accountant to look after your tax return and file it still wise to keep on top of your monthly tasks. This makes handovers much easier, especially when you know everything is in order and understandable. Some of the things to look at include:
- Sort through and organize receipts and expenses. They should be in order.
- Create a spreadsheet to log these.
- File and print copies of paid invoices whether it’s manually or digitally.
- Note invoices against bank statements.
- Complete an income and expenditure log.
- Pay your own invoices.
- Chase any unpaid invoices.
This leads to your cash flow, it’s one of the most important areas of a business. You are at times, waiting on your clients for your cash flow, but often you can cause problems for you by not invoicing on time or forgetting to follow up. Get all your invoices out and make sure your cash flow is looking healthy and in line with what you expect it to be.
Plan Your Marketing For The Next Month
You should always try to sit down for one-two hours to make a marketing and editorial plan for the following month. Your marketing is the bread butter of your business and therefore you need to make sure you have a solid plan in place. List your upcoming campaigns for things such as your blog, your newsletter and social media accounts. Or make a plan to create one of each to give yourself the best chance of gaining new customers.
When you’re creating your plan you don’t need to think about the content, planning is enough for you to know that you need to allocate some time to complete tasks such as this. Plan the types of posts, plan your target audiences, topics you want to talk about and think about your newsletter titles. Then you need to put a plan into place for when you’re going to be working on the content for each of these. Having a plan in place and ideas ahead of the time can help you to prevent procrastinating or worrying that you haven’t got the time to come up with the ideas as well as create.
These are just a few of the ways you can ensure your freelancing business is working smoothly, do you have any other tips that could help? Share them in the comments.
