With the busy summer season approaching in the northern hemisphere, many small businesses are gearing up for the busiest time of the year. More customers can significantly increase your revenue, but summer also brings its own challenges.
If your small business experiences heavy traffic during the summer months, you may be preparing to meet the surge in demand while keeping your team motivated and focused. So how do you manage chaos while maintaining morale?
Here are four tips for staying ahead of the curve so you can make the most of this summer.
Tip 1: Streamline your billing process
The best way to control the influx of payments is to ensure that you have the right systems in place to manage payments. This is especially important for service-based businesses, where their customer base grows significantly during the summer months.
Use time tracking and billing platforms such as harvest Makes it easy to track your bills in one convenient place. This easy-to-use tool automatically converts time spent on a job into invoices that customers can pay online. Harvest also integrates with Xero so you can automatically copy invoices and payments to Xero to simplify your accounting.
Tip 2: Evaluate your team’s capabilities
To avoid the headache of competing for coverage when things go wrong, it’s important to assess your staffing situation before summer arrives. Encourage time off requests for everyone on your team as soon as possible so you can get a more accurate picture of everyone’s availability.
Depending on how much you expect your business to grow, you may need to hire more people to handle new projects or manage the influx of regular customers.
Time tracking apps give you useful insight into your existing team’s capacity, so you can see who has a lot of work to do to help prepare for the summer, who can take on more work, and even You can evaluate whether you should hire an employee. Some apps let you view historical data to help you evaluate your performance in the previous summer season and get a better idea of where you can improve this year.
Tip 3: Check your inventory
It’s easy to get distracted by other aspects of your business, but don’t forget to manage your inventory to meet the demands of the summer rush. With supply chain issues still looming, it’s more important than ever to be prepared in advance. If you’ve experienced a shortage due to the growth of your business over the last few years, start building up now.
Check with your vendor to see if they anticipate future delays, or consider using a new vendor to meet your needs.
Tip 4: Stay organized
Spring cleaning is always a good idea. It’s the perfect time to put your work activities in order to get your business ready for a boost. Here are some ways you can optimize your work processes and prepare you and your team for success this summer.
- Go digital: If something can be automated, do so. From time tracking to billing, Rich online tools This helps reduce the time spent on routine tasks, improve efficiency, and add security to your business.
- Ensure data integrity: Ensure that important documents such as accounting and invoicing are fully backed up regularly to avoid serious problems.
- Check your service contract: Stay up-to-date on all contracts to avoid surprises that impede your ability to meet demands.
- Please complete maintenance now: Evaluate if anything needs to be upgraded, replaced, or adjusted to avoid having to stop operations during busy periods.
Preparing for the summer rush gives you and your team an advantage. This means you can easily handle challenges and avoid unnecessary headaches.and by connecting harvest Together with Xero, operations can be handled better, optimizing workflows and making it easier to achieve results.