Organizing your business is very important, especially very early on, if you hope to avoid future problems. Businesses are typically easy to organize in the beginning when there is little activity or cash flow. It is not until the business begins to grow, succeed and scale upwards that many business owners find themselves in trouble. Whether your business is new or newly rejuvenated, the following tips will help you keep your affairs in order in new and innovative ways.
The Easiest and Most Expensive Method
The first on our list of business organization innovation techniques is to let the professionals handle the job for you. By hiring a CPA and a personal or virtual assistant, all of your taxes, sales records, inventory and client lists, and all other paperwork and information that goes into running your business will be organized and handled, allowing for instant recall anytime you need something important. You can just call the professional you hired to rattle off figures, email you a copy of a document or file your taxes. Professionals definitely will take the work out of organizing your business.
The downside is that you have to pay professionals a pretty penny for the quality work that they do. If you want to keep costs to a minimum, here are a few business organization innovation techniques that are sure to help you out.
Bookkeeping and Accounting Software
Programs like Quickbooks and Quicken can help with organizing your business, as long as you keep up with them. It takes daily, weekly and monthly entries and reports if you hope to organize your business properly. You may still want to hire someone to manage your business software. While much of the data can be automated, new client information will need to be entered, correspondence will need to be archived and marketing and advertising reports will have to be filed properly. While the software above can help with some of that data, you may be better off using or at least incorporating a spreadsheet into your normal business organization innovation methods.
Spreadsheet Programs
Organizing your business becomes much easier when you have everything laid out in a manner that is very easy to decipher. With properly drawn tables and columns, facts and figures become more manageable. It only takes a moment to enter something into a spreadsheet program, and thanks to offerings like Google Docs, you can open or add to a spreadsheet wherever you happen to be.
Open Office, Microsoft Office and Google Docs are three great programs that you can use in the process of organizing your business. With spreadsheets, you can create a book with many sheets, allowing for the organization of many categories. For instance, you might have a book labeled Accounting with individual sheets that represent Cash Flow, Missed Opportunities, Outstanding Balances and Overall Growth. With spreadsheets, business organization innovation is only limited by your imagination.
Organizing Your Business with Apps
Apps like Evernote help you organize all of your business information in a series of text documents, images, voice notes, videos and other media. This is but one example of the type of business organization innovation that exists if you explore your smartphone or mobile device’s app store.
Just know that you will be given the same warning the software folks were warned with. You must keep up with organizing your business – taking notes, making snapshots of documents, recording video of ideas that you come up with – if you hope to keep any semblance of, well, organization.
Regardless of which type of business organization innovation you use, make sure to back everything up regularly. You would hate to lose all of your hard work because of a power surge or failed device. Beyond that, set to-do lists and keep up with them every day. Delegate responsibility when you need to and run regular reports so that you know the people in charge of the various tasks are still on the up and up.
Keep an Eye on Current and Future Trends
If you have the capital, the first option of hiring someone or multiple people to do everything for you is the ideal option. That ease of use is exactly what technology thrives on. Just wait a while, and there will soon be even easier methods of organizing your business that don’t cost a big chunk of your yearly gross.
Use the current technology listed above, but always keep your eye to the future. You never know when business organization innovation may reach that very next level.
Image Source: George Brett on Flickr
CHALLENGE Yourself to Profit!
Free Download: Build Your Profit-Generating Online Business With This Free Blueprint
Sign Up, follow the easy steps and You'll get the tactics, strategies & techniques needed to create your online profit stream. It's free!
