This is a contributor’s blogpost …

 

If you’ve ever actually been to startup offices, you’ll have noticed something: they’re unusually disorganized. There are pieces of equipment all over the place, paper everywhere and a bunch of people looking stressed out of their minds because they can’t find anything – things they really need.

But it’s not just a headache being disorganized: it can have a significant impact on your bottom line too. That’s why so many entrepreneurs are now looking for ways to clean up their act, get organized and help their businesses flourish. Here’s how to manage your startup better.

 

Photo Courtesy of David Blackwell via flickr

 

Ditch Paper Receipts

One of the biggest headaches of running a business is collecting up all your receipts and putting them away in a folder, just in case the tax man wants to conduct an audit. The good news is that, thanks to technology, you no longer have to do it this way. Instead, you can simply take a picture of your receipt and send a copy. That way you end up with less mess around the office and less worrying about losing a receipt.

 

Start Using The Cloud

Is there really any point for half of your office space to be taken up by computers and all their wires connecting to the central server? Or would you be better served with everybody having laptops and tablets connected to the cloud? Unless you’re doing serious design work, the latter is probably the better option. Get rid of the hassle of constantly having to maintain and backup your data and switch to the cloud where it all gets done automatically with minimal involvement from you.

 

Take Charge of Your HR

HR is one of the most time-intensive activities in your business. Booking holiday, doing payroll and organizing rotas can take a lot of time to do by hand. Fortunately, rota software is changing all that and streamlining the work of human resources. There’s no longer any need to type in rotas by hand. Instead, rotas can be automatically programmed using a computer, and clever software will organize who needs to be where and by what time for you.

 

 

Kill Your Overflowing Email Inbox

The Huffington Post has estimated that the average worker spends around 6.4 hours a week, rummaging through their emails and responding the queries. That’s a huge amount of time spend essentially just “talking.” This is why so many businesses are looking for ways to minimize their use of emails and improve worker productivity. One of the ways that they’re doing this is by compartmentalizing emails. Some emails that are directly related to a particular problem are resolved by hand. Other emails where there is an answer on the web can simply be responded to using a link.

 

Invest Less Time In Social Media

It’s no secret that social media is the future of business. But is it taking up too much time at your business? If you’ve already got somebody employed full time on social media, it might be worth looking at ways to help them to get more done during the week. Drop accounts that you no longer use and use post-scheduling software to update your accounts automatically.