6 Repetitive Business Tasks That Are Unnecessary

Running a business can be an interesting, creative endeavor. You take ideas, turn them into reality, and strive for unique solutions as issues arise. Unfortunately, business also comes with tedious and repetitive tasks necessary to keep it going.

Repetition in a business isn’t just dull. It also wastes time and money, introduces human error, limits productivity, and more. Take a look at where you have repetition in your company and automate those tasks to conserve resources.

1. Responding to Customers

Responding to customers is undoubtedly an important task. Communication with customers engages them, builds loyalty, and helps deal with complaints and issues to satisfy everyone. Unfortunately, customer response can also be very time-consuming and highly repetitive. There is room for automation here.

There are different ways to do this, for instance, with an automated email process. Ask employees how much time they spend reading and responding to emails, and you’ll likely find it’s hours a day. Also useful are chatbots. They provide immediate answers to simpler customer questions. Unlike human workers, they can respond 24 hours a day.  

2. Invoicing

Wouldn’t you like to get paid faster? Invoicing is a necessary task for businesses, and with automation, you can get bills out quicker and get them paid sooner. Save money on the human labor required to manage stacks of invoices, including the initial bill, as well as reminders when payment is late.

Invoicing is a relatively simple task, but it takes time to do it. It’s an easy chore to automate. Many platforms offer invoicing services that make getting bills out accurately and on time is much easier. This means that you eliminate human error and get invoices paid more quickly.

3. Payroll

Payroll is essential to the smooth running of a business. Employees have to be paid on time and with no errors. Without smooth payroll, you lose trust from your team members and could even lose valued employees. On the other hand, payroll is time-consuming and wastes a lot of labor hours that could be saved with automation.

Consider automating payroll, if nothing else. Payroll is a surprisingly complicated process because of several elements that need to be considered to do it right: numerous employee classifications, changing laws that affect payroll, calculations for vacation and sick days, and of course, tax issues. There is a lot of room for error here. Automating saves time on payroll and saves money on avoiding mistakes.

4. Organizing Records

Recordkeeping is also complicated and creates a huge potential for costly errors. As a business owner, you need to organize income, expenses, tax documents, contracts, accounts, and employee information, among so much more data.

You can find many systems that will automate this organization for you. For instance, an inventory system keeps track of your stock and keeps all the details in one place with regular updates. An accounting system helps you manage accounts, payments, expenses, and more. To capture everything, use a workflow management tool that you can set up to organize the specific records your company uses.

5. Recruitment

This is one of the most human of repetitive business tasks. Yes, you need to talk to new recruits before hiring them, but there is still room for automation. Use online tools to get your job description out to numerous job sites, for instance.

You can also find tools that screen potential candidates for the qualities you need in a new hire. Quickly eliminate candidates and find those with real potential. This saves employees time going through applications and resumes by hand and provides a useful list of people to interview.

6. Task Management

Good project management is essential for running a business efficiently. The best project managers use automation to keep workflow running smoothly in and between teams. You can find task management software to increase productivity, limit busy work, reduce error and repetition, and boost communication. Visit www.jamsscheduler.com to learn more about automation to execute jobs reliably.

 

There are a lot of options for this particular type of automation tool. Look at the differences, for instance, in Microsoft Power Automate vs. UiPath. Knowing what’s available helps you make the best choice for your business.

Automating Just Makes Sense

Take some time to audit the repetitive tasks your business deals with daily and weekly. Chances are, you’ll find several areas where you could benefit from automation. With the right tools, you will save money by reducing human labor hours, minimizing error, and introducing streamlined processes to most of your regular, necessary tasks.