Business Activities Checklist: 5 Tasks You Should Do Every Day

1. Understand your spending

Frequently reviewing your business finances and properly understanding what all the metrics mean will help your business survive and thrive. Staying on top of your operating expenses, in particular, is absolutely essential. Without a clear picture of what, how and when you spend, you won’t be able to make the best financial decisions for your business. 

To help maintain a comprehensive understanding of your spending, you should track, record and analyse all expenses. Better yet, label each expense in a specific category or subcategory as you go. Spending a few minutes each day categorising spending is painless — especially compared to doing it at the end of the month (or worse, at the end of the quarter or financial year).

Categorising and understanding your expenses will help you to:

• identify potential areas of saving
• create and stick to a budget
• manage and optimise cash flow 
• make the most of tax deductions
• benchmark your actual expenditure against financial objectives and expectations

All of this will allow your business to plan better for the future, anticipate likely cash flow challenges, and continue to meet critical financial obligations such as inventory, rent and payroll. 

Daily task to manage your spending

Use Zeller Dashboard to assign custom tags (such as ‘supplier’) to purchases made using Zeller Mastercard to help you keep on top of spending. Business details are automatically populated for purchases made with your Zeller Mastercard, so you can easily view detailed information about where and how your business funds are being spent. 

2. Check your web presence

Gone are the days when a business didn’t need an online presence to grow. Although you may still receive walk-ins or word-of-mouth referrals, if you don’t take advantage of the power of the internet you will ultimately miss out on enormous opportunities. Worse still, your business could be attracting a negative web presence without you even being aware. 

You need to be proactive and consistent with your online engagement. There’s no point launching a new website, setting up social media business pages, or creating business profiles on industry platforms and review sites if you don’t follow through with regular updates, announcements, promotions and more.

Daily task to manage your web presence

An important element of your online activity involves responding to customer reviews, which are part and parcel of running a business. With more consumers reading online reviews than ever, and these reviews greatly influencing purchasing decisions, you simply can’t afford to ignore this increasingly valuable customer engagement and trust-building tool. 

3. Think big picture

A big picture approach is vital for long-term business success. As a business owner, you should always keep big goals at the front of your mind. Otherwise, there’s a very real risk of these goals slipping into the background as daily stresses take over. 

By running this business, what is it that you are actually trying to achieve? The answer could be to earn $8,000 per month, to quit your day job, to sell eventually your business for a tidy sum, or to retire early. It could also involve giving back to your local community or providing employment opportunities. 

Daily task to stay on track

Regardless of your motivations, make sure you don’t drift away from the core objectives you set at the start and throughout your business journey. Every opportunity that comes your way should be met with the question: will this help me achieve my end goal? 

Zeller Dashboard packs a powerful reporting punch. Ensure you are regularly reviewing your incomings and outgoings to ensure you are meeting these goals.

4. Evaluate your systems

Your business couldn’t run without systems across marketing, sales, operations, administration, cash flow and human resources. These are the processes or orders to ongoing tasks that allow your business to operate efficiently and effectively, even as internal and external circumstances change. 

When you started your business, creating strong systems may have seemed like a luxury as opposed to a priority. However, quality systems enable your business to scale while you maintain a sense of control. In time, the systems you create can be passed on to others so you can concentrate on the business activities that genuinely make a difference. With this in mind, it makes sense to monitor the status and performance of your systems. 

Daily task for system optimisation

Try to take a few minutes every day (or at least schedule time each week) to evaluate your systems and look for ways to make improvements. Could your system be more streamlined or better integrated? Are there any manual tasks that technology might be able to remove? This type of frequent system health-check will ensure you are operating as efficiently and effectively as possible, and pay dividends in the long run. 

One way you can improve your systems is by integrating your point-of-sale system with your payments terminal. Once integrated, sales are automatically pushed from your point-of-sale to your Zeller Terminal — ready for the customer to immediately tap, dip or swipe.

5. Focus on customer service

Where would your business be without its customer service? While your personal goals are extremely important, you should never lose sight of the people who matter most: your customers. The relationships you build with your customers play a critical role in shaping the success of your business, and you should never take their loyalty for granted. At the same time, continually honing those customer service skills could earn even more repeat business. 

Good customer service not only means fostering relationships by building rapport and being helpful when called upon, it also means responding to and resolving any problems (such as shipping, product or billing issues) as smoothly as possible. 

These customer service ideas could be a good place to start. 

• Promote unique service offerings or special offers.
• Create loyalty programs.
• Process refunds promptly.
• Accept all cards, provide a quick payment experience, and set up subtle tipping prompts using Zeller Terminal. 
• Recruit the right people and invest in training your customer service team. For example, staff should be prepared on how to deal with declined transactions — Zeller Terminal and Zeller Dashboard can help navigate this common occurrence. 

Daily task to improve your customer service

Exceptional customer service helps your business to stand out from the competition. Not every business can offer the lowest prices, but you can aim to deliver the best overall experience. 

The last thing a customer will remember about your business is the ease with which they were able to pay. Ensure all staff know how use your payment systems, and that there are no areas of friction — for staff or customers. 

No matter what size or type of business you run, Zeller can help you streamline your daily tasks.