It’s time to get organized and increase your small business’ efficiency!

A new year means a new opportunity to start afresh. For small business owners, now is the perfect time to improve your business organization to stay optimistic and maximise your business productivity, so you can begin your small business’s year off stronger and better.

Here are five key steps that will help you kickstart your business organization process.


1. Systemise Your Documentations and Papers

An effective paperwork management system will save many small business owners’ headaches. Many small business owners often find themselves drowned in a sea of paperwork – invoices, reports, contracts, spreadsheets, records, and financial statements. The list goes on and on.

Organizing business papers in an orderly fashion provides clarity to you on what you have and what you’re missing. It also allows you a greater sense of control over the administrative side of your business.

Start by deciding on a filing system – whether you want to file numerically, alphabetically, or categorically. If you’re going to build a manual filing system, space is a primary concern as you need to purchase enough cabinets to accommodate your current and future files.

For small businesses who are planning to shift to the paperless office, it’s advisable to invest in software for functions like invoice and expense tracking and payroll and use the cloud storage services such as Tencent Cloud or Dropbox for backup and archiving.


2. Master Time Management

Effective time management is associated with greater business success. It can make or break your business and its overall productivity. Therefore, it’s vital to master some time management skills to ensure you are running your small business as efficiently as possible.

Here are some tried and tested techniques to improve your time management skills:

  • Pareto Principle. Also known as the 80/20 Rule is the principle that 20% of what you do results in 80% of your outcomes. For example, taking on clients or projects that require the least of your effort and pay the most can help drive your business to grow faster.
  • Pomodoro Technique. Developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s, this technique helps you power through distraction by breaking your workday into 25- minute chunks with 5-minute breaks in between.
  • Eisenhower Matrix. Also called the urgent-important matrix. It helps you quickly identify the tasks you should prioritize and the ones you should put on the backburner.


3. Optimize Productivity by Using the Organizational Tools

There are numerous powerful and easy-to-use organizational tools out there to assist your small business to stay organized, increase productivity, and minimize your operation exposure to risks.

If you are already using several of these productivity and organizational tools, now it’s time to evaluate the existing tools on whether or not they still meet your needs and are there any new tools you should sign up for to improve your business organization.

Here are some of the key areas where you will find small business organizational tools helpful:

  • Bookkeeping and accounting: Tracking revenues, expenses, and invoices are fundamental to running a successful business. The right tools for accounting and bookkeeping such as Autocount, Bukku Accounting, and abss can increase efficiency, better manage cash flow, and make tax time easier.
  • Meetings and communication: The pandemic havecaused a rapid shift to full-time remote work for many workers, communication has become more important than ever. To help your team communicate seamlessly and efficiently, test tools out, then decide which software will be used for what tasks so everyone is working together. For example, if you decide you want to use Slack for instant messaging and Teams for video calls, then every employee should be available on those platforms throughout the day.


4. Put Your Existing Customer Relationship in Place

Customer contact is the lifeline to any small business. The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of cloud-based operations for small businesses, and many of them have implemented customer relationship management (CRM) solutions at lightning speed. An adequately organized CRM system enables your small business to grow successfully and sustainably.

CRM platforms help your business to simplify customer data storage into a singular dashboard,

making it accessible to all departments and providing a comprehensive view of customers in real time. You can try Nexible to help you nurture and close deals with ease or Sage to drive customer engagement and conversion.


5. Plan Your Social Media Strategy in Advance

Social media plays a vital role in driving sales, providing customer services, and increasing brand awareness for small businesses. If you’re not taking the time to plan your social media calendar for 2022, you might end up rushing to create content that is subpar for your business. Plus, planning content in advance allows you to plan for sales events like Hari Raya and Chinese New Year, for example.

There are many social media planning and management tools out there you can utilize to make your planning easier. Try Buffer for straightforward social media scheduling or Hootsuite for all-in-one social media management experience.

Avex Credit is a licensed money lender in Malaysia under the purview of the Ministry of Housing and Local Government and governed through Money Lenders Act 1951 and Money Lenders Act (Amended) 2003. We provide a variety of personal, mortgage and business loans that are tailored to meet your specific needs.

Want to know if you’re eligible for a loan? Talk to our advisor  to find out more.