Take the Tedium Out of Your Small Business Tasks

Take the Tedium Out of Your Small Business Tasks

Erma Bombeck said that housework is a treadmill from futility to oblivion with stop-offs at tedium and counter productivity. If you’ve ever done clerical work, then you know it is the housework of the small business. Some jobs are mind-numbingly tedious, but they must be done. Here are some tools that can help.

Accounting

Out of all of the functions that you will need to perform, accounting is the most important. Sure, putting numbers into a calculator can be dull, but the financial report is one of the driving documents to your company’s success. Make this job palatable by using a cloud-based, online accounting system like Sage One, and stay caught up by doing it monthly. Make the monthly part something nice for you. Take your laptop and receipts to your favorite coffee place and enjoy the experience, all with an eye on the bottom line.

fall scents for your home

Employee Scheduling

For some, nothing is more ennui inducing than scheduling your staff. It brings up dread as we try to juggle schedules that will make everyone happy while keeping the business running. At its basic, scheduling only requires a set of input data and a good algorithm, so this is a task that you need to give over to a computer program, like ShiftPlanning. It claims to save you 80 percent of your staff-scheduling time. Just plug in the parameters and let ShiftPlanning do the work for you.

File Management

If you had an assistant, then file management would be the job of your assistant’s assistant. In the days before computers, it would be equivalent to labeling files with a label maker. Now, with laptops and tablets, file management has become something personal. There are some utilities that will help make the job faster. If you find this job tedious — and you should find it tedious — outsource it. At the low end of the job spectrum, file management is just putting files in an order where you can find them. Let your assistant do this and have them walk you through how they did it so you know how it’s organized. If you do not have an assistant, get a temporary one. A child or grandchild will do. At the high end of the spectrum, placing files in the wrong location can crash your system, losing valuable data. Have a professional handle that.

Social Media

If you are bored with social media, then you are missing the concept. Social media should be fun — it has social in the name. It’s important to be engaged with the lives and needs of your customers, but tedious social media shows that you are being too advertorial with your posts. Have fun with it. And if you need help managing your channels, use a program like Hootsuite to schedule your posts.

Don’t let banal tasks take over your day. Consider employing these tools to help you get the clerical work done faster. And if you’re looking for more ways to make your business run more smoothly, just remember, there’s probably an app for that.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Take the Tedium Out of Your Small Business Tasks
Scroll to Top