Automation Saves you Time and Money

I have a secret. I am addicted to automation. I love making connections. One of my favorite past times is perusing Zapier to find more ways to connect my various services and apps. And yes, it has waylaid me on other work from time to time. We all have our distractions.

Of course, you may see me writing about this and it makes sense, since I work on the Internet for a living. But how does automation help the average business owner? It totally can!

Automation can save you time! And time is money!

Yesterday I wrote about automated MailChimp campaigns, and that is definitely one. Sending out automated messages that provide ongoing value and sell your products and services can definitely do both of these, but what else can you automate?

Automate Social Media

You can automate your social media using Buffer or Hootsuite or similar tools. Instead of logging into Facebook and then Twitter and then Instagram to share your content, why not load them all into one platform that you can use to manage all of those profiles at once? (And no, that doesn’t mean you have to post the same content on all platforms, nor should you.) It just streamlines the management of your social media. What I like best is the ability to plan out my social media strategy and schedule my posts to go out at the dates and times that I want, rather than having to remember to do it at various times. (I don’t want all my posts to go out at the same time!)

Automate Bookkeeping

I will admit I was a reluctant adopter to this, but I eventually flipped to the dark side. For more than ten years I managed our books manually, entering each invoice and expense and importing all transactions one by one into Quickbooks. It wasn’t the fastest method, but I was comfortable with it. But Quickbooks and other bookkeeping software connect to your banks and can speed up this process. Do I need to manually enter every single credit card transaction when I could just sync and automatically have them all imported? And furthermore, after it gets the hang of it, it’ll already know what categories all my expenses go in.

Automate Time Tracking

We have a distributed team, meaning that we are all over the US, from Indiana to Texas to Montana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. I am not in the office with my team all the time, watching their work. So we need to track time. We used to use a time tracking tool and at the end of the month, each person would export their hours and send them to me. It worked. But it wasn’t the most efficient method. Some months I’d have to routinely remind everyone to send in their hours, then I’d have to go through all their hours, figure out what needed billing, create those invoices, etc. This process ended up taking a long time each month. This past December I switched to time tracking and invoicing with Harvest. With this, every member of our team gets their own login. They can use the time tracking app, a browser extension, or login to the website and track their time and at the end of the month, I already magically have everyone’s hours. And, I can easily pull together invoices for clients because everyone was tracking their time in the same system.

Automate Appointment Scheduling

Ever spent time playing phone tag? Every tried to email back and forth to find a mutually agreeable time for call or meeting? That is a huge waste of time! I use a service called Calendly, which syncs with my Google calendar (and I keep everything in my Google calendar) and when I need to schedule a call or meeting, I just send clients a link and have them pick a date and time that works for them and book it online. What I like about Calendly is that is has a free level, which is great, but the paid level is pretty low cost. You can even allow paid appointments if that’s something you need to do.

Automate Recurring Billing

If you sell a service that renews each month, it can be a pain to set up and remember to send invoices to your clients every month to get paid. Automate that! Set up a system of recurring billing that automatically charges your customers each month instead of sending invoices and waiting to get paid. We offer ongoing support plans for our clients, where we take care of all the technical business of managing a WordPress site. We have many clients on these plans and I cannot even begin to imagine how much time I would spend creating and sending invoices and tracking payments for these plans. Instead clients can sign up online, checkout, and their credit card is charged each month for the service. I don’t have to remember to send invoices, I don’t have to track down payments. I don’t have to remind clients who may have forgotten they got an invoice. It just works.

Automation isn’t just for web pros or digital entrepreneurs. ANY business owner can benefit from automating their systems. When you can cut down on administration tasks, you can cut down on time and when you are saving time, you can use that time for work that pays.