5 ways to make your small business more efficient

Business owners are always on a mission to find the best solutions and run their businesses more efficiently.

Wasted time means wasted money, and inefficiency costs companies on average a massive 30% of their revenue every year.

Finding methods to improve the daily operations of your business could help you to maximise employee productivity, the volume of sales, revenue, and the overall success of your business.

These are 5 ways you can make your business run smoother and with less wasted time and money.

1. Outsource your accountancy

According to a study by Sage, businesses are wasting 120 days a year on administration.

You could save precious time by outsourcing your accountancy.

Businesses spend roughly two days a month sorting and filing their own taxes. The time-consuming and tedious tasks can include keeping up with bookkeeping, tax returns, year-end accounts and issuing payrolls.

Outsourcing your accountancy is the perfect solution to help you to improve the efficiency of your business. Stealing the hours back by outsourcing your taxes to the professionals means that you can focus on areas such as customer service or sales.

Online accountants such as Mazuma can take away the hassle, and stress, of doing your business’s taxes. Through outsourcing your business’s accounts, you’re also less likely to miss out on valuable tax deductions or miss any important deadlines set by HM Revenue & Customs.

2. Improve customer service with the latest telephone systems

A report found that 79% of consumers have experienced poor voice quality with call centres, costing organisations billions globally and damaging the customer experience.

Implementing the latest phone system into your business will mean more seamless communications and efficient processes.

If the calls are improved, your business will see positive results. A telephone system which includes features such as HD Voice will offer crystal-clear audio for both your customers and sales team.

You also may need a new system if you can’t keep your remote workers connected. If your existing system can’t transfer an inbound call to a colleague who is away from the office, then you might want to consider an upgrade.

Keep your business running efficiently with the most cutting-edge telephone systems.

3. Improve operations with superfast broadband

The average UK office worker wastes at least 21 days each year due to slow technology and connections – the same amount of annual holiday. The hours added up trying to connect to pages could cost your business thousands in wasted time.

Is a slow broadband connection damaging the usual operations of your business?

If your employees spend a sufficient amount of their day online – researching and using the internet for work purposes – then a slow connection is going to seriously affect productivity and efficiency.

Faster broadband also makes connecting to the cloud services faster and more reliable. This means smoother communication and seamless connectivity.

Investing in superfast broadband will increase the number of productive hours in the day.

4. Invest in employee development

In the best-performing organisations, 84% of employees receive training, compared to only 16% of the worst.

Take the time to train your employees in the necessary skills for the job. Less time is wasted and there will be fewer questions. You can then have a more advanced workforce, which carries out tasks at a quicker rate.

For example, if you are training a new member of your sales team, spend time showing them previously recorded successful calls from your sales professionals.

The time it takes to correct mistakes of employees who haven’t been sufficiently trained could cost your business sales and time.

The more training that your offer your employees, the quicker they’ll develop, and the stronger your team will be.

5. Improve operations with task management software

According to a study carried out by the University of Hamburg, our concentration span automatically drops from minutes to seconds when online.

To increase the efficiency of your business, you could implement task-management software into your daily workflow.

A powerful management tool you could implement into your business is Intervals – which allows you can track time and manage projects easily.

If you’re worried the software will be tiresome, try Monday.com. It’s been purposely designed to be enjoyable to use.

Asana is the task-management tool for teams planning and building great products. Thousands of teams choose JIRA to capture and organise issues, assign work, and follow team activity

Successful businesses often have an extensive list of tasks which need to be completed and by specific deadlines. Through creating tasks and lists within the task-management software, each employee will have a personalised direction for each day. Management can then prioritise work, track progress and see if time is being spent efficiently.

If the team are focused on the most critical tasks and have time allocated, then it’s likely that more work will be completed by the end of the working day. The software will also ensure that no important tasks fall through the cracks.

Contact us today to find out how our award-winning products and services can make your business more efficient.

Read this handy guide on how to reduce admin and have time to grow your business