The Tech That Can Take Your Home Business Headaches Away

When running a business from home, it’s fair to say that you’re not likely to have the size of the team that even the majority of small businesses have at their disposal. More than not, it’s likely to be just you, maybe the occasional bit of outsourced help, and that’s about it. As such, it can be pretty tough to handle all of the tasks on your plate. If you’re having trouble taking care of your workload, however, you should be looking at the tech that can take it off your plate, instead.

Start the day right

One of the biggest problems with running a business from home and working in your own office or workspace is using your time in the most productive way possible. There’s a lot to do, you want to make sure you’re spending your time doing the right things. With tools like the prioritization matrix, you can decide what on your workload needs to be done first based on how urgent and important they are. From there, you can plot your entire day out into blocks of time, and make sure you allocate those blocks of time to the things that come first according to that prioritization matrix. That way, you make sure that you’re spending your day doing what needs to be done first, not just the first thing that comes to mind.

Don’t miss any appointments

Of course, when you’re scheduling out your day, you need to make sure that any appointments you have set previously are going to be kept. If you arrange a call with a client and you fail to make that call, don’t be surprised if you have trouble keeping that client any longer. There are plenty of free scheduling tools available that can also connect with your phone that you get reminders as to when an appointment is coming up. Some can even send you a “digest” for the week ahead so that if you’re planning out your work in the long-term, you can ensure that you don’t double-book yourself.

Keeping your focus

Another big problem, when working from home, is when you’re trying to get your work done, but your attention keeps slipping to places that it shouldn’t. Social media can be a big culprit behind these distractions, as can Youtube or any variety of websites. There are plenty of website blocking apps like StayFocusd that can make sure you’re not dragging your focus away from work for too long. Install these on your work computer and smartphone, and you can set hours of the day when you’re not to be distracted and block the sites that can keep you back from what you’re supposed to be doing. Of course, building some discipline is preferable, but this can help you get there.

Your very own receptionist

Most home businesses are going to run a website as the face of the business and how they can deliver their services or products, especially in the world of e-commerce. Your clients and customers will need the means to get in touch and, while you should give them an address to email, you should also give them the quick accessible support, such as a customer chat, when they have questions that need to be addressed now. Of course, if you don’t have much of a customer service team, it can be hard to reach everyone, but tools like a chatbot for website from Click4assistance can take care of those needs for you. AI is getting more and more sophisticated and can even use data from the user’s browsing history on the site to recommend resources and steps more relevant to their needs.

Counting all the beans

One of the business responsibilities you really can’t leave undone, even if it doesn’t contribute directly to outreach or sales, is that of your accounting. Lose track of your expenses, your income, and your planned spending and you can quickly find yourself in financial hot water. However, accounting software suites like Sage can help you automate much of the process of keeping your books, while streamlining a lot of the rest of it. You still need to input the figures as you go along, but it can at least do much of the rest for you.

Keeping the shop clean

This one is particularly helpful for those who are running an online e-commerce website. If you’re not using an online shopping portal already, then you might have to do much of the work of managing our inventory manually. Changing prices, uploading and updating product pages, categorization, and the rest can all take a lot of work, but there are online retail business suites that can streamline much of it. You can use these software suites to save your preferred formats for uploading new products as well so that updating your store becomes much less of a chore. Of course, you still need to put in some product details and add the photos yourself, in most cases.

Reach out with ease

If you’re like any good online business, then you should be making use of email software to get in touch with your customers. You can send emails to highlight sales, share content that’s relevant to your audience, as well as to thank customers for shopping with you. However, your emails need a professional touch and a block of text with a logo sometimes isn’t enough. To that end, email management tools such as Mailchimp can help you work from templates that are ready-made. Whilst these templates look perfectly professional in themselves, if you do have any logos, photos, or other visual assets, you can upload them and drag and drop them in place with ease. As such, it takes no time at all to create email campaigns that you can then integrate with any mailing lists you’re building.

Keeping on top of your socials

Nowadays, there are few better ways to stay connected with your customers than social media. It offers a much more informal arena than email, and also allows you to quickly share out content and messages that don’t quite need as much attention, but can be good for attracting a bit of curiosity to your business. It’s best to make sure you’re active on multiple accounts, with Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram being most popular. Of course, that’s a lot of work for one person to do, but with tools like social media management platforms, you can spend an hour composing tweets and posts and schedule them throughout the entire day, rather than having to dip back into it time and time again throughout the day.

Take note

How often will you be doing your thing, either around the home or throughout the working day, and all of a sudden, you have a great idea, or you remember something that you need to immediately get on top of. If you’re at a keyboard, then jotting it down can be a hassle. However, so long as you have a phone in your pocket, dictation apps like Otter can let you record messages yourself and throw on a quick title. That way, you can come back to it later and make sure that you act on whatever notes you left for yourself.

Make file-sharing a lot more convenient

How many times have you either tried to send or receive a file through email, only to have some problem during download or upload, finding that it doesn’t work and has to be sent again? The longer you’ve been trying to email files, the more likely this is to happen to you. As such, it’s a good idea to move onto different file-sharing tools as quickly as possible. Aside from making sure that files are sent properly and always accessible with the right link, these file-sharing sites act as a bit of online storage security, making sure that no-one can steal sensitive files that might be meant for the client’s eyes only, risking your business reputation. 

Getting paid

If your business takes payments through the website, then you need to make sure you have a good payment portal in place and it will typically do the rest for you. However, when it comes to invoicing, it can take some work to edit the details in them, to send them off, and to track whether or not they’re getting paid on time. Then if they’re not, you have to send reminders to get your money, and so on and so forth. Invoice tracking software can automate much of that for you, providing templates that you just have to type the new details into, as well as alerting you to late invoices and allowing you to send reminders and late notices at the click of a button.

The next time that you feel your responsibilities in the office are all getting a little too much for you, make sure that you’ve taken the time to look for tech solutions that can either streamline your work or even do part of it for you.