photo credit: Ange Soleil ( a.k.a Tweng )
Hint: Let someone else do the work.
So. You read Timothy Ferris’ book the ‘4 Hour Work Week.’
You, like I….like everyone… got all excited about hiring a Virtual Assistant to do all your grunt work.
And I bet I know what happened next.
You went to delegate something and realized…you have no clue where to start.
No worries, uncle Kel is here to help.
The list below covers to major time suckers for the small business owners:
Bookkeeping and Secretarial / Office Management.
My original goal was to provide a list of 1,000+ hours worth of work you can and should be delegating. I was going to focus on a number of different areas of the business beyond the two above, but I easily broke a thousand by the time I got out to the second category.
You know what that means — there will be a part 2 to this article in which I’ll continue building on this resource list.
Just what do you do all day?
In my book, it all starts with having an inventory of what you do.
It’s quickly followed by articulating your fears.
Why won’t you delegate this? What scares you about this? Where are the landmines?
That means keeping a piece of paper by your side and logging what your doing, when your doing it, and how long it takes. Then it’s a matter of arranging your work into categories, identifying opportunities for the elimination and delegation.
But you can read all about that in one of my previous articles on delegation.
I’ve provided examples, links to tools and estimated hours per month you may be spending.
Bookkeeping:
Save 11.5 hours a month (138 hours a year).
1. Entering Bills and Record Keeping
With Quickbooks Online and a receipt management service like Shoeboxed.com. You can have all your invoices entered online and managed remotely. Whatever receipts or invoices you get, you can just pop into an envelope and Shoeboxed scans them in. Then your assistant can log in to your shoeboxed account and enter bills into Quickbooks online.
Quickbooks logs who enters what and when so you can verify accuracy of the entries and provide feedback if a bill or receipt is entered wrong. Another nice thing about Quickbooks Online is you can really tweak out user access privileges so if you don’t want your assistant viewing your sales reports, you don’t have to. It’s ultra secure and the data back up is going to be way better than the manila folder you have marked ‘2008′ stuffed in your file cabinet somewhere.
Estimated hours per month: 3
2. Making Bill Payments
Quickbooks does not have direct online bill pay services (yet). But depending on your level of comfort with your assistant, they can still save you tons of time in paying bills each month.
Your local bank is all but guaranteed to have online bill pay. With all your bills lined up in Quickbooks, it’s just a matter of entering the payments for each vendor into the bill payment area of your bank and pressing send. This is really data entry work that an assistant should be doing.
Unless your assistant is your mom, you may not be comfortable handing your checking account over to an assistant, which is probably pretty smart. Set up a secondary account which gives you both access and then transfer funds through ACH each month. You can limit your exposure by only sending cash over in $500 or $1000 increments. If a big bill comes in and a big check needs cut, then that’s a good trigger for them to ping you and ask for more funds. You’re then approving all payments above a certain level. You could also just choose to pay the bill yourself by physical check at that point.
If you’re not comfortable with that, then have your assistant prep the bills up to the point for printing. They can handle making sure all the address information and values are correct. When it comes time to pay the bill, you simply load in blank check templates, print, sign & send.
I recommend using self-sealable, window envelopes. That way it’s just a matter of stuffing the check in an envelop, closing the flap and sticking a stamp on it.
Estimated hours per month: 2
3. W9s / 1099s
If you pay more than $600 to someone who is not an incorporated, you’re going to have to send out 1099s and file a standard 1098 each year.
As part of the record keeping requirements of all this, you need to keep W9s on file for each vendor you send money to. It may be overkill to send it to your local phone company, but the art student you paid to create your logo and set up your blog? You better send him a W9 to confirm his taxable status.
Think of a W9 like a W4 and the 1099 like a W2. One set tells you how to tax someone your paying, the other is the report of how much you paid them over the period of a year.
An easy way to handle all this is to use a service like EchoSign to mail out blank W9 forms for the vendor to fill out and fax back. EchoSign will send it out via email and the vendor faxes it back. They let you know it was received and can even store it online for you.
Here’s where your assistant comes in. Each time you set up a new vendor, they can initiate the W9 process. They keep track of which W9s are out there, update their tax profile in the accounting software , manage their archival online.
Further, when it comes time to process the 1099s at the end of the year, Quickbooks has an easy step by step guide to manage & send 1099s to the vendors. Your assistant should be able to pick up forms from your local OfficeMax or Staples. Then it’s just a matter of printing them up and mailing them out, which again they can handle for you.
Estimated hours per month: 30 min
4. Invoicing
The hardest part of invoicing is not entering of the information and mailing / emailing the bill. ..but it is time consuming. And it’s just not a lot of fun.
A lot of business owners wait until the end of the month and do it all at once. I think that’s just a huge mistake.
Why wait until the 31st to bill work that was completed on the 10th? What you don’t want to get your money 20 days earlier?
I’m an advocate of keeping your life simple. So, why not just email hours, the general job descriptions, and the rates to your assistant AS you do the work. As with everything, set up guidelines, give them a once over before they mail, and get confirmation when they were actually sent out.
Estimated hours per month: 4
5. Reconciling Bank Statements
Most accounting systems allow for daily download of your bank transactions. But chances are you’re still never really comfortable with how much cash you got in the bank vs. payments outstanding.
Ask your assistant to reconcile your bank accounts and credit cards on a daily basis as information is downloaded. If you want to keep track of what’s going on, as them to send you a quick screenshot of the new transactions and a brief summary of the downloaded transactions.
Estimated hours per month: 2
Some Tools You Can Use
Quickbooks Online - Accounts Software
Mvelopes Business - Accounting Software
Shoeboxed - Scan & store invoices
EchoSign -Digital signatures for legal forms & contract management
Executive Secretary:
Save 17 hours per month (884 hours a year)
Does Steve Jobs manage his own calendar, book his own flights, or triage his email? Doubtful. He’s got bigger fish to fry. So here are some secretarial duties you can offload to your assistant.
6. Calendar Maintenance
There a lot of choices when it comes to calendar programs. Most, like Outlook, Entourage Google, Backpack & iCal allow for calendar sharing with multiple colleagues and delegation of administration privileges.
It can be scary to hand over your scheduling to an assistant. But that’s usually because we haven’t articulated what we’re looking for in scheduling an appointment. We don’t like surprise visits by a sales weasel or getting blocked into a 5 hour conference call.
But if YOU’RE clear your scheduling preferences, you can communicate ground rules to your assistant.
An Example:
- No appointments on Monday mornings or Friday afternoons
- Or go the other route: Mondays - Thursdays 9-3 are for sales appointments
- Wednesdays 3-5 and Fridays 10-2pm are for all other appointment requests (accountant, coaching, marketing, doctor, dentist,…golf).
- Appointments should be scheduled 2 business days in advance.
- If appointments are outside office, create buffer times for travel between appointments so you can get across town.
- Include appointment details, agenda, and specific question in the appointment detail so I can review before stepping into the appointment.
- Set a reminder for my appointment 1 day and 1 hour before
While the time savings here may to be all that great, getting your schedule managed by someone else can be a huge stress relief. If your in sales and always o the road, the benefits are huge asking your assistant to arrange sales appointments as your IN sales appointments.
Estimated hours per month: 2
7. Manage Contact Info
If your like me your contact database is mess. I just throw names in there left and right. Or not at all. I leave them in emails and go back and search for them later. I’m always hunting, hunting, hunting.
Using the something like Highrise or one of the other applications above, your assistant can keep
your contact database up-to-date and organized.
I will say Highrise is the newest service on the street. It’s brought to you by the same people who created base camp. I just started using it and so far, I’m pretty pleased. Ohhh and did I mention the personal edition which handles 250 contacts is free? Pretty sweet.
Estimated hours per month: 1
8. Travel Arrangements
This one’s really pretty easy. If you follow the same rules as for appointment setting, you should have no problems. The challenge is articulating what your fears are…
Don’t want to take of at 5:30am?
Don’t want more than 2 hops?
Can’t spend more than $500 for the whole trip?
What’s more, whatever travel site you use — Priceline, Travelocity or Orbitz,etc., — they all make it pretty easy to set up preferences to make delegation easy VERY easy.
The key is document the ground rules. If you don’t do that your never going to let anything go.
Estimated hours per month: 2
9. Email Triage
Ok this one IS very hard for me. I personally am not there yet. But I’m very, very close. I just need to get all my personal non-pornographic membership dues forwarding to a different address.
In all honesty, you can make your life a lot easier with some software tools. Something like ClearContext is a wonderful tool, if not a bit expensive, for grouping and filing extended email-strings on specific projects.
Still, I find I really am only wanting to engage about 20 emails a day. I, like many of you, receive several hundred emails a day and it’s only growing. I’m addicted to my in an admittedly unhealthy & unproductive way.
I’m seeking to insulate myself from the noise so I can give my undivided attention to those few items that really merit my full brainpower — you know, those 2-3 brain cells tat are still working.
Is this just a case of no implementing a spam fliter? Nope, these are all valid emails. Being an senior executive, I get cc’d on just about everything that goes on in the company. It’s all important, it’s all stuff I should know….but wading through the chaff to the ‘point’ is time consuming.
My approach to email delegation will not be unlike my approach to delegating the other items.
As already exhorted, document fears, & make sure my assistant understands them -alright, alight, last time I say that I promise.
- Set up a READ folder in my email application. This will be where vetted emails will be dropped. Of course, my high-priority contacts will be routed directly to this folder. Everything else will route to my
- I’ll ask my assistant to organize & file every email so nothing will get deleted. That way I can find something if a message slips through and someone asks me about it.
- Items they believe that should be deleted will be thrown into a ‘red tag’ file and saved for 1 week. If I don’t pull something out in that time, it’ll go to trash.
- High priority items will be immediately dropped to ‘READ’ 2-3X a day, I’ll want a summary email of messages that were received. I’ll want a summary of who, when, and what in 1-2 sentences each as well as a reference to where it’s filed.
Estimated hours per month: 8
10. Online Research
Too often our approach to online research is --’ I’m not sure what I’m looking for, but I’ll know when I see it.’
We don’t know what we’re looking for, how to find it, or if it’ll be relevant when we get there. Hey, I’ve lost HOURS on ‘StubmleUpon’ too.
If you disconnect yourself from the series of distractions and rabbit trails that IS the internet, you can save a ton of time. Whether you’re researching an article, a sales proposal, or a new product idea, having an assistant — let alone a trained researcher — compile a report for you can be POWERFUL.
Estimated hours per month: 4
Some Tools You Can Use
Backback
Highrise
Outlook / Entourage
ClearContext
photo credit: Ange Soleil ( a.k.a Tweng )
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