How to be Operationally Efficient as a One-person Business.

Being your own boss is one of the true benefits of being self-employed — but it also means you’re probably covering the roles of marketing, accounting, IT, and more. Wearing so many different hats means it’s essential to find and use tools that can help you streamline and improve your administrative and operational tasks. That way, you can concentrate on the actual work that generates your income.

What you’ll learn

• What a one-person business is
• Why having effective and efficient tools is important
• Streamlining tasks and processes by digitizing
• Choosing tools that you can afford, and use
• Ways to digitize systems and documents as a one-person business

What is a one-person business?

Self-employment in Australia can include anyone working as a sole trader, a freelancer, an independent contractor, a gig worker, or set up as a director of your own limited liability company to supply goods or services to others. Self-employed people may hire, subcontract, or outsource work to others, as and when needed, for specific tasks. Typically, though, a one-person business is someone taking sole responsibility for producing and delivering the services or products — and taking care of all the business administration.

Use effective and efficient tools.

In running any business, you need to know to access and use the tools of your trade — the knowledge, equipment, and resources you need to produce the services or products that you are providing to others.

The other tools that any one-person business needs to have include what is needed to help manage the operational and administrative aspects of a business. When you're a one-person business, you need to do this as quickly, efficiently, and professionally as possible. That means having systems and processes to help manage your marketing, invoicing, bill payments, tax, proposal, projects, and so forth — all of which involve document management.

Streamline and digitize tasks and processes.

It can seem overwhelming when you have a bunch of tasks and documents that need to be taken care of in a small business on your own. Start by breaking down the administrative tasks into key areas that you can digitize. This should include ways to digitally manage your finances, tax obligations, marketing strategies, and business plans.

• Invoicing — Charging for your goods and services accurately and efficiently is vital. This involves calculating rates, and payment terms, and keeping track of payments you receive.

• Bill payments and expenses — The operation of any business incurs expenses and bills that you need to pay and monitor. These should be tracked and reviewed not just for income tax preparation purposes, but also to keep an eye on your finances to ensure you’re within your budget, and not spending more than you earn.

• Time management — Keeping track of how you spend your time in your business is vital — especially when it comes to making sure you’re charging customers and clients appropriately for the work you provide. Set up automated deadline alerts and reminders to keep yourself on task and visually lay out all your projects.

• Plans, proposals, contracts, and marketing materials — Coordinated documentation of business plans, proposals, signed PDF contracts and marketing materials can give you that all-important professional edge. Set up templates with your branding to ensure your look is consistent throughout all your business documents that you may provide to others. Use templates for your sole trader documentation and independent contractor forms.

Choose affordable tools and user-friendly tools.

You’ve got a lot of choices when it comes to apps and software to help with digitizing business documents and processes. Three important things to keep in mind are —

1. User-friendly — Choose systems that you find easy to use. Look for products and apps that have online tutorials and help to guide you through step-by-step things you think you should be able to do, but don’t want to spend too much time on your own figuring out.

2. Budget — Think about your budget — what you can afford now, what you may upgrade to later if you are just starting out in self-employment — and even what you can do for free.

3. Safety and security — Make sure you choose from reputable software providers that have security measures that will keep your business information safe and secure — whether you download and install an app or online web-based services. Use free trials of products, such as the free trial for Acrobat Pro to explore what the benefits of different apps are to you.

Digitize systems and documents.

Getting your documentation into digital form makes sense for many reasons. Digital documents are a lower cost to produce for a small one-person business than printing and mailing paper copies. Digital filing space, whether on a device or in the cloud, is also more efficient in terms of physical space. PDF files also take up less digital space than many other file formats.

There are a few ways to produce digital documents as a one-person business. For example —

• Accounting software.
  Either app or cloud-based, accounting software can keep track of everything you need to keep track of financially from accounts payable and receivable to timesheets, and inventory management. Accounting software will also generate reports for tax purposes and to analyse how much profit you are making.
  
  Most accounting software will allow you to generate invoices and reports in PDF format which is easy for anyone with a free Acrobat Reader to access via a computer, laptop, smartphone or tablet.

• Directly into PDF format.
  There’s a lot you can create directly in PDF format with Acrobat. Create PDF invoice templates with form fields that calculate amounts for you. Develop dynamic marketing materials with embedded audio and visual content. Write contracts with a secure digital sign-off process. Present your business plans and proposals that are in a trusted and secure format to send to your clients and customers.

• Excel, Word, and other Microsoft products.
  Many small one-person businesses use the features available within Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint products. For example, Excel can be used for invoices, budgeting, analysing data and producing graphs, and more. MS Word is a popular choice for writing contracts, correspondence, reports, and budgets. It’s simple and easy to convert to a PDF and back again with any documents created in these apps.

Repurpose and reuse.

You can save yourself a lot of time when it comes to digital documents by repurposing and reusing documents and templates as much as you can. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Once you’ve mastered the basics of how to work with digital documents, you’re good to go and it’s easy to learn more.

Create or download templates that you can customize and make unique for your own small business. Slice and dice PDF files to create what you need — merge PDFs, extract PDF pages, add pages to a PDF, rearrange a PDF and more.

Related content.

Keep learning! Here are some other recent articles that can help anyone working in a one-person enterprise be more efficient with operational tasks.

• PDFs: The advantages for working professionals when going paperless.
• Save Time and Money with PDF Automation.
• How to make a PDF interactive.