It doesn’t matter how gifted you are as an entrepreneur, there are only so many hours in a day. Although you might think you have a good handle on all aspects of your business, keeping on top of your day-to-day operations is no mean feat.
When you are running your own business, it’s practically impossible to stay on top of everything at once, even if you’ve kept multiple plates spinning in the past. In fact, there’s really no need to juggle so many business tasks day-to-day given the plethora of tools and technologies you can leverage to streamline your operations, limit the risk of errors, and optimize your internal resources.
Below, we’ll explore three areas of any growing business that can benefit from state-of-the-art tools and software that can semi or fully automate areas of your business.
Project management
With remote working and workforces becoming ever more global, the need for project management tools is greater than ever. Fortunately, there are plenty of impressive platforms you can use to oversee tasks and foster collaboration between colleagues. Trello is one such project management platform that’s attracted serious interest in recent months. It’s easy to create ‘boards’ for each project or client, with each individual task within a board assigned a ‘card’. Task owners can be attributed to each card, minimizing confusion surrounding project responsibilities. Cards can be assigned with deadlines and users can message one another within each card to discuss progress.
Finance
Day-to-day financial management of your business doesn’t have to be time-consuming any longer. There are tools that can simplify and even automate aspects of your business finances. Tools can help with automating invoices to clients at the end of a project and recurring invoices at the end of every month or tracking your business inventory to provide a real-time picture of your goods from order to sale. FreshBooks and Intuit QuickBooks are two popular tools available as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, allowing you to pay for what your small business needs.
As your company grows, the importance of attracting and retaining top talent rises simultaneously. It is essential to the long-term sustainability of your business. These are the employees that have been with you from the ground up and are embedded in your corporate culture. Instead of hiring an accountant and a lawyer, business owners can now very easily create their own EMI scheme to award top talent share options. This incentivizes them to stick around and benefit financially from your business’s long-term growth. SeedLegals charges a one-off fee that enables businesses to design their own EMI option schemes and includes all essential documentation in one neat account.
HR
Human resource departments used to be consigned to the backend of a company’s administrative function. However, with talent retention and acquisition increasingly vital to the sustainability of a growing business, HR is an integral department for managing teams, maintaining morale, and setting individual goals for staff to heighten motivation.
Kazoo is a popular HR tool for recognizing employee success and personal development. It’s rapidly become one of the most effective platforms to create highly engaged teams in the workplace, acknowledging great work and collaboration and simultaneously driving company values. For out-and-out recruitment, the cloud-based platform Zenefits also ticks a lot of boxes, providing top-down visibility of a company’s entire recruitment process, from onboarding right the way through to performance tracking.
With state-of-the-art tools like the platforms mentioned above, you can dedicate more of your time focusing on the bottom line of your business and taking it to even greater heights.
