20 Business Tasks You Should Be Automating

Pexels. CCO Licensed.

There are many repetitive and tedious business tasks that may be possible to automate. By not having to manually perform these tasks, you could save yourself a lot of time and not have to worry about keeping track of so many duties. This post lists 20 tasks that are worth automating to make your business more efficient and easier to manage. 

1. Tracking expenses

You should start by automating your accounting. Many accounting software programs can be linked up to your account to automatically record and categorize every expense. This can help when making tax deductions. 

2. Calculating tax

Accounting software can also help you to automatically track and calculate how much tax you are due. This can help you to more easily budget each of your tax bills.

3. Generating invoices

Another accounting task that automation can assist with is generating invoices. The likes of Acumatica AP automation can also take over tasks like invoice data extraction and matching invoices to POs. 

4. Creating budgets

Some accounting programs can also help you create forecasts and budgets – helping you to determine how much money your business has each month to spend. This could help you to avoid unnecessary debts. 

5. Legal contract creation

Legal contracts can often be time-consuming to write and need to be worded carefully. There are online legal services and programs that automate the task of legal contract creation for you. This could even include tailoring contracts to different types of customer or employee. 

6. Website customer support

Many modern websites now provide an instant chat customer support service for visitors that want to ask questions. Rather than having to respond to instant chat messages manually, consider setting up an AI chatbot to answer customer questions for you. 

7. Email marketing campaigns

It’s possible to use email management software to automate many email marketing tasks. This includes writing emails, segmenting mailing lists and deciding who to send specific emails to based on the past behavior of recipients. 

8. Appointment reminders

Certain types of email management and CRM software can also be used to automate appointment reminder messages. This could help to reduce missed appointments and meetings.

9. Payment reminders

You can also encourage customers to make payments on time by using accounting software or CRM software to send automated payment reminder messages in advance. You can also send out automatic late payment messages whenever you do not receive a payment by a certain date.

10. Requesting customer reviews

Collecting positive online reviews is important for your reputation. Email management software or CRM software can also be used to send out automated messages to customers requesting them to leave a review. These could be automated to send out after a customer has received a product or a couple months after signing up to your service.

11. Sharing blog posts on social media

Publishing blog posts on your business website can help you to get more visitors, however you can receive even more traffic by sharing these blog posts to social media. There are some tools you can use to automatically share blog posts on social media as soon as you publish them on your site.

12. Reposting social media content

Recycling certain social media content can also be worthwhile. Social media management software can help to automatically repost content that has performed well in the past.  

13. Form data entry

When sending out forms to customers to fill in, consider using digital forms and special tools to automatically record this data. This is much more convenient than manually entering details of every customer.

14. Backing up data

Most operating systems automatically back up data on the cloud nowadays. This can help you to ensure that all data is backed up. Make sure that your systems automatically create backup files onto any cloud server or local server that you use. 

15. Employee onboarding

It can be worth automating the onboarding process when taking on new employees. This could include automatically sending a digital welcome pack once you take on employees – this could include contracts, training guides, a digital handbook and other important information they may need. 

16. Project scheduling

When delegating projects to employees, it may also be possible to use software to automatically schedule projects. This could save a lot of time manually distributing work at the beginning of each week/day. 

17. Rota building

If your employees work changing shifts each week, it may be necessary to create individual rotas for each staff member. Some HR software programs can help to automate this tedious task and can save you a lot of time. 

18. Time tracking

Instead of using time cards to record how many hours each employee has worked, consider switching to digital time tracking. Employees can clock in and clock out via an app on their phone and the total hours of each employee can be automatically added up to make calculating pay easy.

19. Inventory tracking

There are various ways in which companies can automate inventory tracking. POS software can automatically track when items are sold to help keep track of stock levels. It’s even possible to use RFID technology to track the exact location of every item in a warehouse and automatically track when an item has been moved or left the warehouse.

20. Routing calls

Finally, when it comes to taking calls, it’s possible to set up a phone menu that can automatically route calls to the right department. This can be easier than using a secretary to route calls. There are other phone tasks that may also be possible to automate.

Conclusion

Clearly, there are many business tasks that can be automated. And this is only a small selection! Keep up to with the pace of your competitors by leveraging these automation tools and save yourself huge amounts of time and manual effort.