Andi Smiles, Small Business Financial Consultant + Coach
Andi Smiles is a long time financial consultant and certified professional coach. She also works for Collective, a financial platform for self-employed business owners.
The following is a transcript from an interview between Square and Andi Smiles. It has been edited for length and clarity.
As business owners navigate through unexpected events like supply chain disruptions, labor shortages, and inflation - how can they decide which tasks to automate and which to take on themselves?
Andi: A misconception about automation is that automation means being completely hands-off. You don't really want to be completely hands-off with anything in your business. So one of the things that I encourage people to do is to identify the tactical repetitive tasks that don't require strategy.
So for example, in bookkeeping, you're categorizing transactions. There's not really a business strategy and categorizing your transactions is something that you've got to do. It's the same thing with the act of running payroll. Even in inventory management, you do inventory counts and reconciliations. Those are things that don't require your strategic hat, these are the things that should be outsourced. On the execution side are the things that you want to look at outsourcing. The things that require a process, require execution hours, right? That can be your execution hours or your staff's execution hours, things that require consistency. There are a lot of things people can do themselves but they're not doing consistently. This is where things get messy and overwhelming.
What you want to keep for yourself or your staff are the strategic elements of your business. For example, you can outsource your bookkeeping, but you may want to review your reports every month to understand financial trends and channels. Another example is that you can outsource the chasing down of failed payments but as the business owner you also need to keep an eye on influxes of chargebacks and identify how to prevent that in the future. So you want to stay engaged with the problem-solving aspect of the tasks but also identify what is repeatable, what needs consistency, and what is really straight execution. That's what you're going to outsource.
What are some ways to reduce the time or money spent on business processes?
Andi: We love accounting software because it allows for automation and integrations with other software. You open up the line of communication with a bunch of different other platforms that you might already be using. Zero could be talking with your payment processor and suddenly that's lending itself to a lot more automation.
The next thing people usually think about is invoicing. The great thing about invoicing software is it can automate a lot of the tedious tasks that are involved with invoicing. Those are things like reminders, making sure you're charging your late fees and sticking to your late policies, follow-ups, and even storing credit card information for automatic charges. What you're really getting into here with invoicing software is not just around, how do I automate this process? It's also around keeping a healthy cash flow in your business and ensuring that you have money coming in.
For inventory management, it's tricky to name a tool because so many of them are industry-specific. Foodservice is going to have very different needs than a retail shop and you may want to lean into an inventory management platform that's more built for your industry. You also want to be looking again at something that's going to integrate with your other systems.
Another one is payroll. Manual payroll is extremely time-consuming. There's also a lot of room for inaccuracies, right? So it can also be very stressful for people. This leaves them wondering, am I really doing this right? It's quite the process.
Then the last one I want to name, because I think this one often gets overlooked, is sales tax automation and tools. It can be really, really tough to know all the laws of sales tax. Sales tax is one that people don't often think about when they think about how to automate the financial side of their business. It's also one that can be a huge time-saver.