How to cut down busy work to meet your small business goals
Learn how to reduce your administrative duties so that you can run your business profitably and meet your strategic business goals

Sage joins the roster for the new MLB season
To celebrate the 2023 MLB™ season, Sage has teamed up with Baseball Hall of Famer Cal Ripken Jr. to give some Sage customers and baseball super fans a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Reduce your administrative duties
With goals like growing or diversifying your business, increasing your profitability, and bringing exceptional talent on board, you’ll need to reduce your admin to the bare minimum, if not entirely. If you think you’ve already done so, or aren’t sure where all the time goes, give yourself a worktime task audit. It’s easy by using a time tracker app. There are plenty on the market, including some that are free. You need to cover a long enough time period to give you a reliable snapshot, say a week or two. To get started, first think about what you spend your time on over a representative time period, categorize the main tasks, and divide them into two groups: administrative and mission-critical.Mission-critical tasks vs. administrative
Mission-critical tasks include:- Analyzing your revenue trends by customer segment,
- Updating your sales and marketing strategy, based on an assessment of the success of your current strategy,
- Evaluating the life cycle of your products and services,
- New product/service development,
- Budgeting, and, crucially,
- Executing the plans you make based on what you learn from completing those tasks.
Cover every base with winning insights and financial solutions
Learn more about our MLB™ partnership and how Hall of Famer Cal Ripken Jr. set his Out of Office for MLB Opening Day.

Where your time goes
Start making sense of your time audit by looking at the time you spend on mission-critical activities. Unless you’re fully satisfied with what you have achieved in those areas, it’s time to shrink the time spent on administrative tasks to get the important stuff done. But how? First, take a look at the range of time-saving tech solutions, like AutoEntry for Sage Accounting, that cut down your admin work and give you back time to spend on value-added work.Digital solutions
Some solutions are simple and don’t reinvent the wheel. An example is invoice templates that are easily customized, conveying a professional image when you’re seeking payment. Common productivity apps might already be well-stocked with common business templates. If not, a quick Internet search for business document templates will yield lots of options. Another burgeoning area of administrative task streamlining involves easy digitization of paper business documents, including expense receipts, that can not only be easily digitized but incorporated into summary reports for that category of document. On a broader scale, productivity-enhancing tech solutions in areas like accounting, HR self-service, payroll, and invoice processing, can shrink the time required to handle the full range of business administration functions. Despite its marvels, administrative task time-saving technology still requires human support. That’s where the final piece of the puzzle to reduce your administrative duties involves ensuring that you have qualified people on your team who you can offload non-mission critical tasks to. An investment in administrative talent could pay for itself many times over if it frees you up to do the things that only you can do and must do well to accomplish your strategic business goals.Reduce admin and boost productivity
5 ways AutoEntry and Sage Accounting save you hours of admin. Download the guide today.
