Automating Your Small Business: Improve Your SMB Finances with Technology

Let's be honest: owning a small business can sometimes feel like a dream, and sometimes feel like a nightmare. When you own a small business, you never get a break. There's always something more that you have to do.

But there are ways to get around that, and to get your company's technology working for you. Automation isn't just for your personal and household expenses. By automating your company's finances, you can free up your time to focus on enjoying your success.

Step 1: Stop Tracking Your Finances Manually

Modern accounting solutions are able to automatically import your transactions, rather than forcing you to manually input them. While you may need to modify the categories of your expenses and income manually, you'll at least always have a real-time balance.

As your business grows, you'll find your number of transactions growing, too. Small businesses often have difficulties with cash flow problems: they can repeatedly find that their accounts have been depleted. The only way to resolve this is to make sure that you're always tracking your transactions.

Step 2: Sign Up for a Sweep Account

Many banks provide something known as a "sweep" account. These are linked checking and savings accounts. When your checking account drops below a certain balance, it pulls money from the savings account automatically. This prevents you from over-drafting your account, while still keeping as much money as possible earning greater amounts of interest.

Signing up for an automated sweep account can greatly reduce the micromanagement of your funds: you'll never need to worry about potentially over-drafting your account again.

Step 3: Automate Your Accounts Payable

Rather than having to pay your bills automatically, automate it! Your recurring bills can be set to paid on auto-pay, so you don't need to worry about them. When combined with a good, automated accounting solution, your business will practically run itself.

Paying your bills on time maintains better relationship with your vendors, which in turn makes your business operate more smoothly. If you frequently find yourself sitting down to pay your company's bills, consider the more important things that you could be doing with your time.

Tip: Automatically paying off balances for loans and credit cards can help your business build credit, while also ensuring that you never miss a payment and incur costly late fees.

Step 4: Set Up SMS and Email Alerts Set up email alerts on your bank account, so you can get notified any time transactions take place. Most new, electronic banks will let you get an email or text message alert if your account balance is starting to run low; some banks will even notify you of every transaction.

Transaction notifications will let you keep in touch with your business, so none of your transactions are missed and you always know what's going on with your bank accounts. This is especially important if you've outsourced some of your accounting.

Speaking of that...

Step 5: Outsource Your Payroll to an Automated ServiceA payroll service will deduct the money for payroll directly from your account and then distribute it on their side to your employees, the state tax collector, and the federal tax collector. An automated payroll service can reduce the amount of time you need to spend calculating hours, and you may not have to do anything at all: many of them offer their own bookkeeping solution in which employees can enter in their hours.

Payroll is something that many small business owners really struggle with, and a mistake with payroll could be costly in terms of fines and penalties. If you find yourself taking a lot of time to calculate your payroll every two weeks, a payroll service is a fast, automated way to manage it.

Your payroll company will also be able to produce your 1099 and W2 reports at the end of the year, another time-consuming process, while helping you on-board new hires with W9 forms and other important documentation. Hiring isn't everyone's wheelhouse and requires a lot of work; an outsourced payroll company is usually quite reasonable compared to the services they provide.

Step 6: Add Recurring Payments to Your Accounts ReceivableDoes your company sell recurring subscriptions of any type? Do you charge a retainer? Consider adding automated, recurring subscriptions for your own accounts, to bring in steady revenue streams.

There's a reason why so many businesses are changing to a subscription model: it brings in consistent income even when the service itself isn't being used. Today, there are many merchant services that provide automated, recurring payments.

Step 7: Digitize Your Documents for Tax Time

Rather than having to store all of your old documents and receipts, install a business expense app on your phone. These apps take pictures of your receipts and documents and store them, converting them into digital files and even entering them into your accounting system (if compatible).

Come tax time, you'll just need to print out an automatically generated report, rather than sending your accountant large volumes of random information. This is especially important if you frequently need to be reimbursed by your company for business-related expenses, as you'll need to keep clear records for this.

Step 8: Automate Your Collections Accounts

In addition to subscription payments, there's another area of your accounts receivable that can be automated: collections and billing. Draft collections notices and have them automatically emailed out at intervals, so you don't need to follow up on payments on your own.

Automated invoicing features will reduce the amount of administrative work you need to do while also improving on the effectiveness and the consistency of your accounts receivable department.

Step 9: Use a Time Tracking and Expensing App

If your business is a service-related business that bills out on time, you may spend a significant amount of time just tracking your hours worked, so that it can be billed out later. Time tracking and expensing apps can be used by yourself and your employees: just start the timer and allocate your time to a client, and you'll be able to automatically generate invoices later on.

Step 10: Analyze Your Income and Your Expenses

Finally, use your technology to regularly review your balance sheets, income and expense statements, and general ledger: this is going to tell you the core fundamentals about your business, how it's trending, and what you need to work on in the future.

Modern accounting solutions are able to produce dynamic, robust reports that can tell you virtually everything about your company, including projecting your company's performance out into the future and warning you of potential risk factors moving ahead.

The less time you spend on your administrative tasks, the more time you can spend improving your business, interacting with high value customers, and negotiating new deals. Automation is what makes it possible for one person to do the work of ten: and that's something that any small business owner knows is necessary. For more information about how automation can improve every aspect of your financial life, review the possibilities at Automate 100.

William From the field of Finance budget automation, I am working at automate100 and writing a lot of informative stuff since long. Website: https://automate100.com/