From Great Idea to Detailed Plan:  Your Business Destiny Awaits

When an awesome idea hits, entrepreneurs are often ready to pounce, particularly when it is a unique business idea with a lot of potential.  Sometimes the small details of management planning are lost along the way, but those tasks are important parts of the daily management of business.  Fortunately, there are many tools and tricks to help business owners manage the minutiae of administrative tasks.  Read on for UNOVA Coworking‘s tips to make your business destiny come true.

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Getting Goods and Supplies

Placing orders for supplies and managing your inventory is a crucial aspect of running your business.  If you are making drastic changes to the business and its goods or services, it may be necessary to identify alternative vendors specific to what you have in mind.  Often specialty vendors can be found through trade magazines.  Shop around to make sure you are accessing good prices and watch out for shipping costs, which can drastically impact your profit margins.

Inventory Assists

Maintaining inventory once your business is established can be a less-than-exciting task.  Fortunately, business owners can use inventory programs to stay ahead of their supply needs.  The best part of an inventory system is the automation that saves a ton of time and misery.  There are many programs available at a range of prices, depending on the size of your business and how much automation you require.

Business owners may be able to delegate some tasks to trusted employees if there is a question about whether there are adequate funds for an inventory program.  Inventory may be a good task to delegate initially.  As business increases and you get your sea legs under you, it may feel like a better time to invest in a program for inventory.  Sometimes there are tasks that business owners take on independently to save capital, and others are more vital to the functioning of the business, such as payroll.  When it comes to payroll, using an established, automated system can spare you hours at a computer and a lot of frustration.

Payroll Simplicity

Most business owners do not relish endless hours crunching numbers for payroll.  To avoid errors in manual calculations, automated platforms can be an ideal solution.  When you use a timesheet calculator, it creates a more accurate account of your worker’s time, including breaks and overtime usage.  Automated systems are also great for keeping track of the varying classifications of workers, which reduces the likelihood of human error.

Another factor to keep in mind regarding payroll is that if you have employees in other countries, you’ll need to find reliable methods for paying them.  One option is to use a money transfer service like Remitly, which allows you to streamline safe and secure payments to people at guaranteed delivery dates in many countries, including Mexico and India.

Technology has offered business owners a wide range of time-saving tools that can change operations for the better.  You can decide which ones meet your needs and whether they are worth the investment.  As your business continues to grow, you may find that automated systems are a time and energy saving way to operate.  Regardless of the systems you choose, consider ways to make your business sustainable and reduce your stress as an entrepreneur.

Questions or comments? Have any additional tips or resources to share? Reply below or reach out to Courtney Rosenfeld.

11 Essential Apps for Business Owners to Have More Free Time

Business Apps
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If you’re a small business owner, entrepreneur, or coach who’s working hard to get your passion project out into the world, but you also want more free time in your day-to-day life, then these apps are perfect for you. They’ll help you get organized and work efficiently so that all of your essential tasks don’t fall through the cracks. UNOVA Coworking offers a list of the top 11 apps that will help increase your productivity and give you back some precious free time!

1) Google Drive. It’s the perfect app for collaboration with colleagues, sharing documents, and storing company information. You can also create a document in seconds that will allow several people to work on it together in real-time.

2) Slack. This collaborative workspace allows individuals to work together with their business teams from wherever they are while retaining complete control over who has access to your conversations. It also offers integrations with other apps such as Dropbox so users can sync files across platforms without switching back and forth between different screens or programs.

3) Trello. Trello is a great way to manage projects. With its clean and straightforward interface, you can create boards for different tasks with cards representing the steps needed to complete those tasks.

4) Adobe Spark. When it comes to creating professional level designs for your social media or website, this app makes it easy to tap into your creativity. For example, you can use their banner generator to quickly craft a compelling design with fun graphics and fonts that give the impression it was made by a graphic designer.

4) Dropbox. This app allows users to store files in the cloud and access or share them from any device, anywhere. It offers integration with many other apps and desktop or laptop computers, making it a handy cloud app to have.

5) Zoom. This app is now a classic video conference and screen-sharing service that offers many of the same features as Skype or Facetime but has some great extras like recording meetings.

6) QuickBooks Enterprise. QuickBooks is distribution software for wholesale businesses that helps you keep track of inventory and optimize your wholesale distribution. It can automatically tally up purchases, record stock updates to ensure you have the correct information to fulfill our orders, avoid out of stock, and provide analytics on sales data for an easy view of how your company is doing financially. Integrations to leading e-commerce platforms are also a welcome feature.

7) QuickBooks. A flexible accounting app, QuickBooks allows you to manage expenses and invoices, track payments, and stay on top of all of your essential financial metrics and help curb your spending, among other things. It offers multiple integrations, as well as the ability to send reminders for overdue payments.

8) Scanner app. This app turns your phone into a document scanner, letting you quickly digitize paper documents. The ability to scan anywhere will make it easier to have your office on the go without needing to carry around endless bits of paper and post-its that inevitably end up getting lost.

9) Asana. This cloud-based work management app is excellent for people with many individual tasks or different projects to complete. It helps you keep track by providing reminders, and it also lets users share lists so that they can collaborate on projects together.

10) Evernote. Dividing up tasks among team members can save time for everyone. This app lets users share notes, lists, and files across devices to work together on projects efficiently.

Do you already use some of these, or do any of them sound like they could benefit your company? If so, give it a try to see if you can get a little help to free up your time.