As you take on additional team members or larger bookkeeping tasks as your business expands, necessary tasks like payroll and filling various tax forms can consume a lot of time and impede on the goals that you would like to work towards as a business owner.
Although it is an exciting journey to take your great idea to begin a business and see it grow, new entrepreneurs and business owners will often find themselves spending more time than they would like to with the not-so-exciting, logistical nitty-gritty.
Automating these logistical tasks can be invaluable to a business owner so that they can free up time in their busy day to focus on the goals that they want to accomplish, instead of being occupied with the tasks that they need to see to.
Today, we will take a look at the differences between the urgent and important aspects of building a business, and how delegating accordingly or finding the right tools to assist in the back office can create new capacity for more billable hours.
Importance Versus Urgency
In Stephen R. Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, he writes that unimportant, but urgent activities often swallow up the time for important, but non-urgent ones. He recommends that one should direct their energy at the activities that are most important in realizing one’s values and goals.
Stephen Covey created a time management model, that separates activities into 4 quadrants:
- Important & Urgent: According to Stephen Covey, the activities that inhabit this quadrant would be crises, pressing problems, and deadline driven projects.
- Important & Not Urgent: This quadrant would encompass activities such as prevention, relationship building, and exploring new opportunities.
- Not Important & Urgent: Logistical proceedings, Interruptions, and some phone calls and meetings (you know the ones), would fall under this quadrant.
- Not Important & Not Urgent: Trivial matters, time wasters, and excessive relaxation would belong in this quadrant.
Oftentimes, we might find ourselves needing to address urgent matters, foregoing important matters in the process.
As a business owner or entrepreneur, your time is crucial; whether you are exploring new opportunities, building client relationships, or developing your craft, there are only so many hours in a day.
According to Stephen Covey, these important activities are often put on the backburner, residing in the important, but not urgent quadrant.
While already juggling all of the important things that you would like to see accomplished for your business, you may find yourself needing to address certain roadblocks that aren’t directly related to the overall growth and success of your business.
These pressing, but overall “unimportant” or unprofitable tasks lie in quadrant 3. These activities often keep us from focusing on the details of the business that connect directly to our goals.
Some of these tasks include: payroll, figuring out suitable benefits packages, and the entire hiring process.
These critical undertakings, which are necessary for running a business, can be extremely time consuming. As a business owner, it may be in your best interest to delegate these tasks, or better yet, automate them so you can focus on growing the revenue of your business.
Let’s have a look at some of these vital back office operations.
Payroll
Especially as your business grows, payroll is an essential task that can be completed in an efficient, and timely manner.
Calculating wages, keeping track of your employees hours, establishing pay rules, and making payments to the staff are all part of the payroll process. These tasks consume precious time that could instead be spent accomplishing other objectives in a growing business.
Between custom deductions, vacation time, taxes, earnings, financial reports, and more, crunching the numbers and sorting through your employee records can prove to be incredibly time consuming as well as being a logistical nightmare.
Rushing through payroll and making mistakes can also be remarkably costly for your business.
Errors in the payroll process are damaging to the efficiency of your business and can be the cause of hefty fines.
In addition, additional hours have to be spent in sorting out potential miscalculations, you may also find yourself facing various fines.
If having your profits hit twice by unexpected time expenditure and fines are not enough, delays in the payroll process can also be damaging to the credibility of your business.
It is imperative for any business to streamline their payroll processes and to ensure that each pay period is consistent and accurate.
Spending too much time addressing payroll concerns can also be surprisingly costly to business owners. If a business owner were to extrapolate the cost of time lost, they can often find a very good justification in investing into an automated payroll system (or finding the right one).
Benefits
After carefully vetting candidates and finding the right person(s) to join your team, you have to begin looking at benefits providers and find a comprehensive benefits plan that is suitable for your business and new employee(s).
When considering a comprehensive benefits plan, there are options that extend beyond wages and mandatory benefits.
This might include:
- Additional vacation time
- Health care and dental plans
- Life and disability insurance
- Flexible working hours or telecommuting options
An attractive benefits package is an excellent way to retain your employees and keep them happy. However, looking for the right benefits package can be time-consuming.
If you are interested in reading more about creating a benefits package for your employees, click here.
Human Resources
Hiring, termination, and mediation are all very time-consuming tasks for a growing organization. Combined with onboarding, training, performance checks, compliance, and various other HR procedures, the “simple” task of adding a new team member may take more time than one might expect.
Furthemore, dealing away with cold, corporate HR and providing your employees (or potential employees) with a finer human experience can be beneficial for the well-being of your organization as a whole.
With that in mind, it is extremely useful for a business owner to delegate this process, or consult with an HR expert as HR tasks will become increasingly time-consuming and difficult to manage as the business grows.
If you would like to learn more about all aspects of the hiring process, you can find an extensive blog series regarding the subject here titled: Hiring Your First Employee.
We’re Here to Help
With all of the tasks mentioned above (and more), we’re here to assist you.
If these time-consuming endeavours are a pain point for you, but you feel apprehensive about spending money on a system that might not be right for you, a free trial is available for our comprehensive and easy to use online payroll system, no hidden fees involved.
In less than 5 minutes, you will be able to gain full online access from anywhere, electronic records, and robust payroll processing.
For a free live quote for a benefits plan that is suitable for your business (and is also integrated with our payroll system) click here.
To get in touch with our human experience experts click here.
As a business owner, you may find that delegating and automating back office tasks in order to create capacity for more billable hours to be both immediately profitable and beneficial for the overall growth of your business.
Ultimately, we’re here to support you and your growing business. Be it setting up payroll, finding you the perfect benefits package, or helping you along the hiring process, we provide a range of services that will allow you to delegate and automate these crucial tasks.
