ULTIMATE GUIDE ON HOW TO ORGANIZE YOUR SMALL BUSINESS

Written by Miss Samantha Elizabeth

For some small business owners, organizational skills do not come naturally. Don’t Worry, you are not alone. Knowing how to organize your small business can help save you time, feel less stress and get projects done quicker. If organizational skills are not your top trait, that is okay, I got some quick tips that can show you how to organize your business quickly and easily. Learn how to organize your small business to make your daily routine more productive and get more done in your day! Learn how to kick your organizational skills into overdrive.

TIPS ON HOW TO ORGANIZE YOUR BUSINESS

ORGANIZING TIP: ORGANIZE RECEIPTS AND BILLS

This is an important tip to put in place especially if you want to save time around tax season. When starting out or at the beginning stages of your business, knowing how to organize receipts and bills will help set you up for success in the future. 

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    The first thing you should set up is a physical folder to organize receipts that you get a hard copy of. Next thing to set up is a folder in Google Drive (my preference) or on your computer for digital receipts. In both your physical and digital folder, make tabs to organize all of your expenses.

    Some examples are: phone, utilities, meals, supplies and rent.

    Whenever you receive a receipt for something purchased for your business, you must keep it with your receipts and do two things. First, record the receipt into your accounting software such as Quickbooks or Freshbook. If you are not at that stage yet, to have accounting software you can kick your organizational skills into high gear and create a simple expense template. This can be done in Google Sheets. 

    With tracking and organizing your receipts into accounting software, it will allow you to easily see how much money you have spent. And will also save you from a headache at tax time.

    Next, file your receipts accordingly into your physical or digital receipt folder.

    ORGANIZING TIP: USE TEMPLATES

    Using templates whenever and wherever you can save you loads of time and really expands your organizational skills. You can use templates in your inbox, on social media, and for any regular recurring tasks.

    EMAILS

    Most small businesses will start to find that they are always replying to the same questions in their inbox. Once you are in business for a little while you will start to know what questions you get over and over. When you respond back to a question you get asked repeatedly, save your response as a template in a note-taking app like Evernote. Make sure the template is general and not specific to one person and use spaces on parts like the person’s name in order to customize the template before sending it out! Now every time you go to respond to a question you get repeatedly, you have a template to easily copy & paste and is personalized to each person.


    SOCIAL MEDIA

    A great way on how to be organized in your social media accounts is to implement templates into your social media accounts. You can create templates that you can reuse when creating Pinterest posts that will save you tons of time. When you create a Pinterest design next time, save it as a template. That way the next time you go and create a Pin graphic you can do know have to waste time designing the graphic. All you have to do is change the colour, picture and text!

    ORGANIZING TIP: PASSWORD SAVING

    If you consider yourself a very forgetful person this is a fantastic way to be organized when you have a million different passwords. Saving your passwords in a software program like Lastpass will allow you to store all your passwords in one place. All you have to do is remember one password to log into Lastpass and it will get you to all your accounts. It is extremely helpful when you work with several clients and have multiple log-in’s for one website.

    This is a super-easy way to be organized and to ensure you’re not wasting time every day resetting passwords you have forgotten.

    ORGANIZING TIP: NOTE TAKING

    When taking notes during webinars, or writing down ideas for a future blog post. Make your notes in a digital note-taking app like Evernote, or even Google Docs. Having all your notes digitally allows for less chance of losing all of your important notes. 

    Before I started to take notes digitally, my workspace would be filled with post-it notes and scrap pieces of paper everywhere. It was so hard to find past notes I had written and wanted to refer back to. Over time I have lost a lot of notes I have written on scrap paper. there were some very useful tips I heard in webinars and podcasts that I have lost because I did not write them out digitally I kept them on a scrap piece of paper which probably mistakenly got thrown out.

    ORGANIZING TIP: DIGITAL FILES

    As a small business owner, you will always have a ton of digital files on your computer. It is super important that you know how to organize them in order to save you time and stress down the road. When first starting out in your small business, it is much easier if you take time to organize your digital files before they get out of hand. 

    MAKE FOLDERS

    Depending on how many digital files you have it may take a bit to make folders for all your documents and then file them accordingly. Make some time in your schedule to do this will allow a smooth workflow. You will know where to find documents and ensure that your project is not bottlenecking because you can not find a file.

    RENAME

    If you really want to uplevel your organizational skills, rename all your files to be able to search for them easily, and have them organized in an organized fashion. My recommendation is to label each file by category in all capital letters followed by an underscore and then a more detailed description and date if needed. 

    ORGANIZING TIP: CUSTOMER SUPPORT

    In your business, if you seem to get a lot of emails about customer support and you notice a lot of emails are going unanswered, it is time to start automating this process in your business. Having good customer support in a service-based business is vital if you want to grow your business. So once you start noticing more and more customer support questions coming through, it is time to learn how to organize all these questions to ensure happy customers.


    Implementing a system like Groove into your operation will ensure no question goes unanswered making for happy customers and saving you time from digging through your inbox. It has an easy layout to see your communication back and forth and makes it simple to find which customers are still waiting for your support.

    ORGANIZING TIP: DECLUTTER YOUR WORKSPACE

    This may be the easiest task that many people skip when looking at how to be organized in their business. Having a clean workspace with the least amount of distractions is important if you want to have a more productive day. If you have a stack of paper cluttering your desk, file them away or recycle any that you do not need anymore. Any food, pens or things that do not pertain to your business like household mail, should be put in their respective spots before you start work for the day. Items like that will cause more distraction throughout the day, you should clear off your desk before you start work.