If you are are looking to grow and advance your business this year, you need to start off in the very right way, and that means ensuring you are organized and efficient from the very beginning. Even the most excellent concepts won’t work if you are disorganized. In this article, we look at a few straightforward ways of organizing your small business to help you get ahead this year.

Organize your office space and storage systems.

A tidy work area will straight away aid productivity. If it is untidy and messy, it will result in essential items and documents being filed away in the incorrect place and lost. To begin with, ensure that everything has its own place. This may be a filing drawer, a storage locker or even in a neat pile in a tray on your desk. Make sure that everything is clearly labelled as well, so it can be pulled straight out, rather than spend valuable time looking for it. When something has been used, ensure that it is put back in the right place immediately. Try to have a clear desk policy – make it part of everyone’s routine to tidy everything up before you close the office for the evening.

Go paperless.

Paper can be one of the leading causes of clutter, so why not implement a paperless system in your workspace?  Don’t keep hundreds of physical files and folders, instead, scan any necessary documents and store them digitally on a cloud system. If and when you do have bits of paper come into the workspace, use a ‘one touch’ policy – try to only handle a piece of paper once before either scanning it and filing away digitally or getting rid of it.

Offer a variety of payment options for customers.

The days of cheques have long gone, and cash is slowly dying out. More and more of us use digital payment systems such as Apple Pay or PayPal, but if that is not an option for you, make sure you have a way for customers or clients to pay with a debit or credit card. If they have to mess about withdrawing cash, you may find they take their business elsewhere, so look around for the best credit card machine for your business.

Have a team calendar or scheduling system.

If you have to arrange regular appointments or meetings, you will need to find a way of these putting these into a diary and making sure everyone knows where they should be at what time. While a hard copy office diary is still needed in many workspaces, more and more of us are working from home or other locations, so an effective digital scheduling system, such as Google Calendar,  that can be accessed by any of your staff from anywhere is vital.

Keep on top of expenses.

While it can be easy to just put any receipts and proof of outgoings into a box or folder and sort them out at a later time, it is a much better use of your time to deal with them as straight away.  Scanning them into an app that manages it all for you, or numbering it and adding it to an accounting spreadsheet as soon as it comes in will simplify things. Your system really does not need to be complicated.