A recent report that I read stated that one of the biggest challenges facing small business owners is the mountains of administration required including financial administration.
It stated that on average small business owners spend on average 71 days and approximately £35k per year on admin tasks alone.
While dealing with the business’s administration burden can be onerous, it is not an insurmountable challenge.
Changes in the way that you approach it, the way you think about it, and technology can tackle admin and will make a real difference to your or your teams’ productivity and efficiency, freeing up time and energy to focus on improving and growing your business. This article is going to explore 5 ways that you can beat the administration burden.
1.Split the financial administration
Administration falls into two distinct types, operational and compliance. Operational tasks are those which are key to the smooth running of a business-like managing invoicing, payments coming in and out of the business, or recruitment. Compliance administration involves tasks that are mandatory in nature like preparing and filing tax returns. They don’t contribute to the success of the business but do have consequences if not completed.
By understanding the difference between the two types of administration it can be a useful framework for prioritising the financial administration load and avoid unnecessary fines or penalties for noncompliance.
2. Prioritise
Many of you will have heard of prioritising tasks into four groups (a) Urgent and important (b) Urgent but not important (c) Non-urgent but important and (d) Non-urgent and non-important. Important tasks are those that have a tangible impact on the business. Urgent are those that have an impending deadline. Ideally, you should plan in advance so that your important tasks do not become urgent e.g. filing your company returns. You know in advance when the deadline is and therefore you should build this into your plan to ensure that it is completed and submitted on time. Of course, life does not always go according to well-laid plans and something urgent will come along that needs to be dealt with immediately, like replacing a member of staff who has decided to leave or has gone on long-term sick.
4. Outsourcing
One of the ways in which growing businesses can beat the financial burden is to outsource their financial administration. The core principle behind outsourcing is simple. You take a task that you don’t want to do, don’t have time to do, and pay an expert to do it for you. This allows you to offload some of the financial admin burdens and in most cases allows the work to be carried out by a specialist more experienced and more efficient than if it was handled in-house. Financial tasks such as bookkeeping, payroll, sales invoicing, credit control amongst many more can be outsourced. Indeed, the whole accounting and finance function can be fully outsourced. Of course, other functions like HR, IT, and marketing can also be outsourced.
5. Digitisation
In the era of today’s technology, taking advantage of digital tools to streamline or automate your workflow is another obvious way to reduce your business’s financial administration burden. You don’t actually need to spend large sums of money to start automating some of your financial admin. The introduction of cloud accounting and a range of integrated applications is a great first step towards managing the inflow of financial administration making it more efficient, simple, effective, and stress-free. Such software is available through a low-cost monthly subscription that can scale as your business requirements demand or grows.
6. Integration
One of the key benefits of digitisation is integration, meaning that the data or paperwork is touched only once but can be populated in several ways across different functions. Integration between different administrative software opens up numerous possibilities. In the case of cloud accounting, you can sync your accounting software with your bank, your payments solution so that your customer payments can instantly appear in your account rather than needing to be input manually. You can also use the software to create and send invoices automatically, manage your vat returns online as well as capturing all the relevant data to manage your business. This significantly reduces the need for considerable data input, duplication, the element of human error saving the business both time and money.
Cloud technology and the use of APIs have opened up some may possibilities for time-saving, cost-saving ways that once explored, you’ll wonder why you didn’t do it sooner.
If you are interested in exploring cloud accounting technology for your business or indeed outsourcing, Ekstra Accounting Solutions has two separate articles on these two topics. Go along to www.ekstraas.co.uk our website and find these to either read online or download.
If you wish to explore even further then you can get in touch in the following ways
Email: janet.jensen@ekstraas.co.uk or Tel: 07458 302 512.
We would love to help you achieve this challenge, remove the strain, save you time and money and let you get on with what you do best …. Running your business.