You’ve just picked up the keys to your new business and you’re itching to get started. You open the office and sitting in front of you is a big pile of books, and it dawns on you that this mass of paper is the booking system and accounts ledgers for the business. You suddenly realise that you’ll have countless late nights trying to balance the books with pen in hand and your fingers bashing away at the calculator. Or maybe your new business has an antiquated PC with spreadsheet after spreadsheet marching across the screen that requires manual calculations. So, where do you start in trying to add in automation to help you sift through this mess?

Automate Your Bookings

The best and easiest way of adding some great digital help to your business is by investing in a robust and easy-to-understand booking system. You need to make sure it’s one that can be integrated with online portals like your website or Tripadvisor listing to make it as easy as possible. Not only does this make it smooth for clients to engage with you, it can help you out with reducing staff costs, make deposits simple and make maintaining your occupancy rates a breeze.

Get a Great Bookkeeping Program

The world is filled with effective and easy-to-use bookkeeping programmes. Finding the right one for you can take some time, and is often simply a matter of personal preference. Whatever the programme is that you land on, make sure it’s intuitive to use and that you don’t need a software programmer degree to operate it. The programme should be a like a natural extension of your skills and be easy for you to tailor it to your business requirements.

Asset Tracking System

If you have multiple assets and need an effective way of keeping track, a digital inventory system is the way to go. There are lots for you to choose from, and depending on the cost of your assets you can invest in some that simply catalogue what you have through to full GPS level asset control to ensure you can locate them wherever they are. These are great for tracking multiple vehicle locations or assets like phones and computers.

Moving your office to a partly automated state of being or deploying improvements across a newly acquired business can seem like a large investment up front. When weighed against the time that you need to input and the ongoing cost of doing things manually, the benefit can definitely be seen over the long term. The financial benefit may even out when analysed, but at the end of the day would you rather be in an office calculating up bills and wages or simply press a button and let an automated programme do it for you? Less time on the books means more time focusing on the elements of the business that you excel at and, more importantly, that you enjoy.