Balancing between admin and operation when you are still a small business.
In this day and age, time is everything. Life is fast, business is fast, and an effective business, is a business that is aware of its surroundings and is in full control of the data generated daily.
For small businesses, unfortunately, this does not come without its own share of challenges.
Knowledge is power, but processing that knowledge might come at a cost. The cost might not necessarily be financial, it might affect your pocket as much as it might affect your operation or your human resources. Yet one can’t ignore that in 2015, the services sector of the U.S. economy was losing about 50 million hours, or about $7.4 billion a day, in productivity. This is not isolated to the U.S. of course, it is a problem that effects every country, as well as your business.
Below I will list some challenges that I encountered when managing my own small business, years ago. I am more than sure that many of you will relate with my challenges. I will split this article in 3 parts, the first one below is;
“When you are a one man show, you want to spend your time doing the job that pays you, not wasting time in admin.”
This is true for many entrepreneurs managing startups. You focus primarily on delivering the job. Many businesses struggle to find the time to bill. It takes you time to bill for the job, especially if you bill monthly and you must compile time sheets, or collate job sheets manually to compile an invoice / bill. And if at times you are using software, some applications out there are complex and add more pressure on your operation rather than reducing it. Many therefore struggle to find a balance.
“When you start getting help and adding employees, you will still prefer operation to admin. Your first employees will most probably increase your billable hours rather than help you manage admin and billing.”
You employ your first employee. You think things are going to get better, and guess what, admin work only gets worse. Now not only you have to manage your admin, but billing has doubled and you must make sure that your employees track the time you need to bill for. Controlling these new factors adds even more stress and time constraints to your schedule.
“Tracking the detail is even more taxing on your operation. At times, your customers take advantage of your disorganization to delay payments or not pay you for work you have delivered.”
This used to be typical. It used to take me time to collate all the job sheets and compile proper time sheets. This delayed my billing, so customers used to get extra credit time, which effected my cash flow. This was only part of the problem, some customers requested additional detail in invoices, this detail at times was on job sheets but it took too much time to compile on invoices. Not to mention that at times, employees handwriting was not legible, or employees fail to enter the detail required, and by the time I would notice, the information would be either missing or said data would be misplaced or forgotten.
“You barely manage to invoice. Thinking of gathering some basic data for analysis, is unthinkable when you are drowning in paperwork. Therefore, growth, does not happen strategically but haphazard and without a plan.”
There comes a time in your startup’s life when you start trying to analyze the information you have, for various reasons, planning, cost control, forecasting. This is when it dawns on you. The information you need is all over the place and your accounts software lacks the operational detail you need. The information you need is either on paper or spread in excel sheets and other places. Once more, time proofs to be an issue because you simply can’t seem to find enough time to get your act together. Certain data is also old data. Old data at times is hard to decipher and the older it becomes the less relevant it becomes. Therefore, untracked in a proper system all the data you have is useless.
The above challenges made me think, what tool can I use to resolve the above issues? It had to be a good valid tool, which provided the detail I required, but was at the same time easy to use and fast. Nothing I used managed to close the gap and so after some time, we decided to build a tool that filled said gaps and fulfilled all the above and more.
If you can relate with our challenges, why not try our time / job sheet management software Timestead for free for 30 days? You will not be disappointed.