Article Title: Basic Ingredients of Small Business Management Author: Stephan Szugat Word Count: 991 Article URL: http://www.abenetis.com/encyclopedia.html Format: 65 Characters per Line ------------------ ARTICLE START ------------------ Basic Ingredients of Small Business Management
This article is about
most important basic ingredients necessary to manage a small business. However, they are also necessary to manage very big businesses as well.
As all entrepreneurs know there is just one thing everyone needs to do, but most don't like it very much. It's solid foundation of a business controlling system, your accounting/bookkeeping. Being able to control your business requires an up-to-date accounting. However, sometimes rough pictures about your business situation and development are enough to decide what has to be done next.
In these situations your controlling system needs to use other figures, as accounting data you usually get once per month. If your controlling system allows you to use early indicators, such as number of customer contacts in a given period, than you could be glad, because you got a system which enables you to see what's actually going on and not what has happened in past.
To have control of your business needs a controlling system where you get weekly reports, which just show you most important numbers of your business development. There are some numbers which will always be important, such as customer contacts, new customers, customer loyalty as well as some data from your accounting system, such as your total receivables, payables and your bank account balance, which have to be observed carefully.
But your controlling system won't run your business, so it is most important to have a lean organisation as it is called these days. It's most important to have an idea of your workflows, so that you are able to adapt your organisation to your needs. This will save tremendous time, which could be used to develop or improve products and services for your customers. There are many ways how you could structure your organisation. Being able to retrieve documents from your archives fast is one effective way, to save a lot of time. A small archiving system could be set up within minutes, if you don't like to use document scanning. You only need an index list of your folders, than all documents have to be indexed as well.
Indexing documents is done by showing folder number in a list, describing document and assigning a number to document, which will be kept in list as well. In case you are searching for a document, you just need to search descriptions; taking indexed folder and looking for document carrying number you are searching for. This system requires using a numerical archiving system, which is not usually used by most of us. It takes a little time to get familiar with it, but when you saved a lot time searching for documents, you would be glad that you use it.
