When you set up, selling a service, you might not realise just how much comes with running every aspect of your own business. It can be quite daunting at first; however, there are so many systems, websites, and apps that can help you streamline your processes and help you get stuff done, so you can focus on what you’re good at.
Accounting software
Freshbooks is an all-in-one system that will make the accounting side of running a business a whole lot easier. You can set up automatic systems that will chase invoices and collect payments, and use the reports to better keep track of your income and outgoings. It also integrates with other systems such as Stripe so you can get paid easily and securely.
Project management
Choosing the right project management tool for your business can take a bit of trial and error and depends on what you are looking for. If you want something that you can really customize and make your own, Notion is a great option as you can create ‘boards’ for different things as needed and embed videos, articles, and webpages.
Asana is another option that is really collaborative, which is perfect if you want to allocate different tasks to different team members. You can set yourself recurring tasks for things you need to remember to do every week and choose which projects you share with which other members. You might even want to try a few weeks of each to see which works for you.
Social media planning
No one has time to be posting on every social media platform live each day, so it can be a big help to dedicate some time every week to line up your content ready to go out. You could use something like Buffer to queue up simple Twitter and Facebook posts, whereas Planoly will help you design your Instagram grid and let you see how it will all look together.
Design
We aren’t all design whizzes, and we can’t always afford to outsource every graphic our business needs. Thankfully, Canva is free and super easy to use, with a whole load of templates, images, and icons to use. It even has documents set up to be the exact right size for everything from tri-fold leaflets to Instagram posts. There is a paid plan which offers even more, including allowing you to upload your own fonts and unlimited use of more royalty-free photographs, cartoons, etc. That said, if you try the free plan, you will likely find it does most, if not all, of what you need it to. Perfect for creating promotional social posts and even your own logo.
You will likely try different systems and find that some work better for you than others. None of them will work unless you take the time to set them up properly, so although it might seem like a lot of time spent up front, it will more than make up for it in the long run.
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