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An organized business is a productive business. You may not consider yourself blessed with natural organizational skills, but now is the perfect time to get your business and work space organized.
Below are 10 tips to help you do that and get on track in the new year.
How to Organize Your Small Business
Purge Your Office
Even if you don’t mind a little mess and dust, too much clutter can add to daily stress and chaos. Clutter exists because we think that everything is important. With the new year, toss out whatever is outdated, no longer relevant or a duplicate.
For example:
- Recycle the broken electronics you may have stashed in a closet.
- Delete all those old voice messages.
- Donate anything you don’t need or use.
- Keep the basics and anything you’ve used in the past year; all else can go.
When your workspace is clean and uncluttered, you’ll enjoy spending time at your desk and won’t waste time searching through junk or moving piles around.
Organize Your Paper Files
One study found that the average person wastes over 4 hours per week searching for papers. Go through your filing cabinets and shred anything that’s out of date or no longer relevant to your business.
If you’re worried you might one day need four-year old notes from a client project, then scan the originals and throw out the paper files to make more room.
Ditch Paper Receipts
Considering the IRS accepts electronic copies of receipts, there’s really no reason for you to continue hanging on to all those tiny paper slips from restaurants, taxis, office supply stores, etc.
Find a receipt management scanner or app for your smartphone (such as Neat Receipts) and make sure your solution lets you export data to whatever expense reporting/accounting app you use.
Use the Cloud for Storage and Sharing
If you haven’t done so already, start using cloud-based tools to share and save documents. For example, Google Drive lets you store up to 15GB for free, while giving clients or colleagues access to collaborate. Other tools include Dropbox and Box.
By housing files in the cloud, you can help clean up your personal storage, as well as save valuable time spent emailing documents back and forth when collaborating with others.
Tame Your Inbox
If your email inbox has become a catchall for every email you’ve received over the past years, it’s time to clean house. It is possible to manage your email inbox so you only see the messages you still need to deal with and everything else is neatly archived for safe keeping. Start with a clean slate by filing away everything you no longer need to respond to.
Next, tame the level of new emails you get each day by unsubscribing to newsletters or other subscriptions you no longer read. Create specific folders where non-essential emails go automatically, so they don’t interrupt your daily flow.
Get the Right Note-Taking Tool
One key to staying organized and effective as a small business owner is having the right solution for jotting down any tasks or inspirations when they strike.
Whether you prefer to use pen and paper, voice recording on your smartphone or an app like Evernote, the most important thing is that the solution fits into your lifestyle so you’ll use it consistently.
Tidy Up Your Social Media Profiles
It’s not just your email inbox and desktop that fall prey to clutter. Your social media profiles can also become clogged and out of date.
First, take stock of where your business has a social presence and drop any accounts that are no longer in use. There’s no point in having multiple Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr and Instagram profiles if you’re not actively posting and monitoring each account.
You can also use a tool like JustUnfollow to weed out any followers who are inactive or aren’t following you back.
Meet with a Tax Advisor
Don’t wait until it’s time to file your returns to start thinking about taxes. Make an appointment with a CPA or tax advisor early in the year.
If your business is still structured as a sole proprietor, now’s the time to think about protecting your personal assets and gaining other benefits through a formal business structure like an LLC or corporation.
Take Charge of Your Books
If you run a small business, you already have some kind of process in place for invoicing, processing payments, recording expenses and tracking projects. But if you haven’t updated your process lately, chances are there’s an app out there to help make these administrative tasks easier and more efficient.
Take a look at your tablet/smartphone app store for a new tool that could help you get organized and take charge of your books in the new year. For example, there’s FreshBooks, Mint, Kashoo, and InDinero to name a few.
Tie Up Any Legal Loose Ends
This is a perfect opportunity to tie up any loose ends you’ve been putting off in prior years. For example, did you file a DBA (Doing Business As) for your business name? Did you get a Tax ID number? Are all your licenses and local permits in order? Did you make any changes to your corporation and LLC and still need to file an Articles of Amendment to record those changes with the state?
What other tips can you offer to get your business organized this year?
Organization Concept Photo via Shutterstock
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I agree with the utilization of cloud. It is important to keep everything minimalistic by purging everything that you don’t need. Of course, this will still depend on how you work. From here, you can determine the things that you need and don’t need.
Thanks so much for reading and commenting Aira!
Your email inbox and desktop may fall prey to clutter. Your social media profiles can also become clogged and out of date. It is time to organize and de-clutter things for any small businesses.
As a rule, I declutter my inbox everyday. I don’t put off dealing with emails until later. I decide if I need it for later use. If not, I delete it. This way, the number of emails don’t accumulate over time.
Diana – so true! Great added tip!
Can’t stress the importance of cloud enough. There was another study conducted recently that showed that the average cost of printing and couriering official documents in the US was $30 – just imagine the amount of money that could be saved if all these documents were on the cloud.
Anand
Yes – so true! Thank you for reading and commenting Anand!
Excellent reminder to what is available for small business…With using cloud storage the key. Thanks for your tips.
Thank you so much Helene! Glad you enjoyed the post!
Great tips for small businesses.
Organizing your desk important especially is great to get rid of papers that just take up space and you don’t need anymore.
Thanks so much, Tamar! Appreciate the kind words.
I joined Dropbox couple of days ago and I AM IN LOVE! Why I didn’t join sooner is beyond me.
My next task is email spring cleaning. I make it a rule not to have more than 500 emails, but lately it’s been creeping up. It’s now approaching 600. Need to nip it in the bud. Want to get it back down to 500, and eventually down to half of that. Pray for me :).
Love it!!!! You can do it! 🙂
Got it down to 548! 500, here I come!
Made me realise how much ‘just in case’ emails I’m holding onto. I don’t need them – haven’t read some in months.
Now I’ve started spring cleaning, I can’t wait to continue. 🙂
Dropbox is like an answer to my prayers. I just love it. I can sync everything on it and I can access my dropbox account on my laptop, smartphone, etc. Very straightforward and easy to use. It can really help in keeping your files organized.
Been hearing about Dropbox for a while, Eds, before I finally downloaded it. What prompted that was my computer dying on me temporarily. I hadn’t backed things up either. Once it was fixed, Dropbox became my best’est friend :).
Opting for a cloud-hosted Bookkeeping solution can do multiple things to help organize your business. For example QuicBooks cloud-hosted has a document management system that can help you streamline your back office and go paperless, inherent paperless billing solutions, as well as the ability to access your books from anywhere, including a tablet or phone.
Great article! I also believe it’s best to meet with your tax adviser more than just a couple of times in the year. It can really help a business stay on track and know where they need to improve before it’s to late. Thanks for sharing!
What about privacy issues using dropbox …
“organizing projects”
i have been doing some testing now for about 10 years (actively) to find out if my business is viable and ways forward. i was looking for ways to manage projects cause i need some ideas about that. i have an idea of what i want, i’m not into the virtual storage thing either, no way!
i’ve just heard to many horror stories of people getting locked out of their accounts, or no disclaimer talking about privacy and protection against plagerism. i’m ready to get my structure up and going and i liked the colorful picture of the office trays at the beginning of this article.
when it comes to corporate-projects management, am looking for more data about that.
thanks for sharing.
best,
I need help on organizing myself to keep a couple business organized. I need recommendations on what applications to use to purge calendars, schedules, information… this information was useful but very basic. Do you have any recommendations for something more in depth?
Thank you, Nellie. Fantastic list. As a small business owner I used to spend countless hours organizing my invoices and bills, but in the end I had bits of paper and receipts all over my desk. Few months ago I started to use Getmyinvices.com. This is a cloud-based document collection, storage and organization software that can save me valuable time and help to increase efficiency. All you need to do is enter account details to online portal that you use (like Google, Amazon, etc) and invoices will be collect automatically. It also sync with leading accounting software.
Thank you for your information and I will check out your site. Because of years of hard physical work and arthritis from the age of 21, I am changing directions. My sister and her husband who live on the same property as me, bought a well and pump business. There is nobody else in the entire region to call except him. He’s already grossing over 30,000 a month. My sister hates the office and would rather be out in the field. She shaves absolutely everything and QuickBooks is not yet set up. She doesn’t even know where to begin because she could barely keep up with what’s coming in. Organizing the office so that it was comfortable and very need to something I can do. Voc Rehab will even pay for QuickBook classes and some personal consultation if I need it. So right now any tip to help me get going and get started is a blessing.
—You talked about Get the Right Note-Taking Tool
One key to staying organized and effective as a small business owner is having the right solution for jotting down any tasks or inspirations when they strike.
Whether you prefer to use pen and paper, voice recording on your smartphone or an app like Evernote, the most important thing is that the solution fits into your lifestyle so you’ll use it consistently.
I still have not found a method that works for me! i go out and buy all this stuff thinking this is how am going to do it— Do you have sites for Get the Right Note-Taking Tool?