As a business owner, it’s important that you monitor all areas of your business and regularly keep up-to-date with best practices and your technology. However, that being said, with so many different technologies and practices being applied daily this can be hard to do. For this reason, we recommended putting together a spreadsheet (Google Docs or Excel will do the trick) of all your important tasks and ordering them in order of importance.
What things should you keep up-to-date you may be thinking? Every business is different, with different systems running that should be updated and looked after. However, there are some standard things that you may want to consider which we will cover below – these include keeping your contracts up to date (a contract compliance tracker from Ontra.Ai is ideal for this), spending some time on your accounts to ensure your finances are correct, regularly updating your business plan, understanding your taxes and more.
To help you with running a successful business, below we have put together four different things that you should keep up-to-date when running a business.
Regularly Spend Time on Your Finances
It goes without saying, no successful business is successful without spending a lot of time monitoring its finances. Your finances are so important – by running reports you can see your profit and loss, you can see the areas of your business that are performing well and the areas of your business that may need improving. Regularly updating your finances also allows you to keep an eye on your expenses as well as prepare you for your tax return at the end of the year. If you do your finances manually, it may be worth investing in an online accounting software as not only will this save you time, but also make your accounts more accurate.
Spend Time on Your Business Plan
A lot of people will spend a lot of time on their business plan when launching their business and then forget about it once their business is running. This should not be the case and in actual fact, you should be spending some time on it every few months. A business plan allows you to set targets and think about your strategy. It can help you identify new markets as well as keep your eyes on your goals. As your business grows, your business plan will change and end up looking completely different to how it started. If you have the time and patience, it may be worth writing a blank one every six months and seeing how it differs. If you are ever pitching for new business or investment from a bank, they will most likely ask to see your business plan.
Keep Your Contracts Up-to-Date
There is a good chance that you have contracts with different suppliers as well as your employees. As a business owner, it’s key that you revisit these contracts on a regular basis to ensure they are up-to-date with best practice and still relevant to what you are doing. It may be that you need to update them with new clauses and add new terms if something has changed. When updating a contract, you will need to make sure it’s signed and that your supplier or employee signs to agree with the changes to their contract. If you ever need help with a contract, reaching out to a lawyer may be worthwhile as this is what they do on a daily basis – it is not expected for you to be an expert unless this is your area of work.
Update Your Website
Spend a moment each month updating your website with new content as well as ensuring it’s up-to-date with the correct pricing. Your website’s software may also have updates that need to be applied to ensure it’s secure. If you can, your website is something you can delegate to someone else if you have employees working for you as most of the time these updates are easily done.
As mentioned above, every business is different, so when looking into what you should keep up-to-date, take into account factors that affect your business that may not affect the majority of others. Alongside these, we hope the above four tips give you a little more information to help you with running a successful business.
What things do you regularly keep up-to-date to ensure your business is running smoothly? Do you agree with the sections we have included above? Is there anything you think we should be adding to this article? Is there anything you would like to share that would benefit our readers? Let us know in the comment box below, we would love to hear from you.
