Let’s face it, small businesses today have a lot to handle. From accounting to customer service and everything in between, many business owners seem to need to do it all. Many lack the desire and/or revenue to hire multiple employees to handle the work load. This means that business owners can end up wearing many different hats. For you owners out there, we want to tell you there are many Software tools available to help with time-consuming tasks like book keeping, payroll and customer service. Here are 5 positions you can fill with software:
Accounting
Let’s start with accounting. Most start-ups and small businesses don’t have the revenue to justify hiring a full-time accountant. Completing accounting tasks is an important part of knowing how your business is doing, yet can be difficult if you don’t have an accounting degree. Accounting software can make keeping track of your business’s books simple, especially if you choose a good one.
The best options will offer a lot of extras to help you expand your business. Sage 50 accounting software, for example, can help you with inventory, vendor management, sales and give you a comprehensive view of how your business is using its money. Knowing where your money is going is a very important feature to a business working on a tight budget. Using a good accounting software should provide you with business analyses tools so you can see where your profit centers are and help you find opportunities to earn more. Whether you’re tackling the accounting yourself or have an employee to do it, a good accounting software will make your life a whole lot easier.
Human Resources
Now for Human Resources: If you have multiple employees, you know that keeping track of benefits, payroll, and time sheets is a time-consuming job. Small businesses rarely have the money to hire a dedicated HR or payroll specialist, so HR tasks often wind up with administrative assistants or office managers. Yet these personnel already have long lists of other tasks they need to complete to make sure the business runs smoothly.
Human resources software keeps track of time and attendance, payroll, and benefits. When everything is together in one place, it’s easier for you to see how much each employee costs your business and whether you’re having any time and attendance issues, especially with remote workers. So if you are trying to do everything yourself, we recommend you look into a good human resources software.
Marketing
Small business marketing: We all know if you are running a business, your marketing is an essential part of the business. Yet, many small businesses don’t have anyone on staff who was hired for his or her marketing experience. You can probably learn to set up your own blog and mailing list, but if marketing isn’t your specialty, I would recommend leaving this to the professionals and luckily there is software for this too.
Marketing software fills the gaps and helps you and your employees focus your marketing. The best software options help with designing email campaigns, creating blogs, and generating behavioral information about your website’s visitors and email subscribers. You’ll still need to create your own high-quality content, but marketing automation reduces the overall amount of work you’ll do on marketing. And if you need help with content and marketing in general, check out www.upwork.com where you can post a job and hire a professional to help you with just about every type of need you could have.
Customer Service
As for Customer Service: Small Businesses often have customers contacting them from social media to email to phone calls. Fielding all of this is time-consuming and can be chaotic, especially when you’re switching between multiple platforms. Again, most small companies cannot afford to hire one person just to handle customer service issues. Thankfully there is Customer service software that can put all of your customer interactions into one place. Customer service software packages can also provide you with live chat features, can create a database of your customers, and help you keep track of multiple issues at one time.
Learning Management
With Regard to Learning: On-boarding and training is tough when you’re running a small business. You want to make sure your new employees learn their jobs quickly and well so that they can become essential team members. However, you and your seasoned employees don’t always have adequate time to devote to new hire training.
Learning management software allows you to create a course of materials, including videos, to help your newest employees learn essential aspects of your business. Learning management systems like Travitor Pro allow you to see when your new employees have completed assignments so you can give them more to learn and monitor their overall progress. Combining learning management software with a good, in-person training system will lead to a training program your new hires will appreciate.
Running a small business can be exciting and busy with a lot of different moving parts and not enough staff to handle everything. As entrepreneurs, we often times try to do everything ourselves as it is difficult to take the time to hire or spend the money on new employees. In those cases, there are many software programs that can really help you out. Check out the ones mentioned in this article, as well as others, and see if they can’t help you lighten your load just a bit so you can really enjoy your business.
