Optimizing and automating administration

by Alliance Virtual Offices

Business Process Automation, or BPA, is a strategy used to save a business time and money. Typically it's done by bigger companies, but it doesn't have to be exclusively restricted to them.

Single founders, consultants and small business can find great benefits from optimizing and automating portions of their business. These include gains in productivity, better time management, increase in business and generating more revenue.

Tim Ferriss wrote about how these practices could apply to entrepreneurs and consultants in his bestselling book, the 4-Hour Workweek. He demonstrated and showcased how outsourcing, better task and time management could be combined to help small businesses be more effective.

This Smart Guide seeks to further outline a similar process and break it down into actionable steps you can take right away to refocus your attention and grow you business. Specifically, we'll show you how to:

• Focus on Pre-Optimization - before you can think about optimizing and automating, you first need to take into account all the tasks you handle and where you spend your time. We'll share key tactics to help to account for everything.
• Optimize Your Business - now that you know how and where you spend your time, this section will help you focus on streamlining, implementing effective project management, and outsourcing.
• Automate Administration - after having streamlined and delegated certain tasks, it's time to take this process to the next level. Automating repetitive administration tasks is the next phase of clearing up your valuable time.
• Automate Accounting - accounting, expense tracking, bookkeeping and invoicing is another large, time consuming area that can be automated. We'll show you how.

This Smart Guide is for entrepreneurs, consultants and virtual workers alike - whether you're new to business or a seasoned pro.