Hiiiiii Seller Community! Hope you're having a wonderful Wednesday. This question was selected on behalf of the Square org, who wishes to learn....
What tasks are the most tiresome and time consuming, but necessary to keep your business running?
Looking forward to hearing and learning from you all โค๏ธ
1. Inventory Management
2. Scheduling
3. Social Media Posts
accounting is so tiresome and tedious but not enough for me to pay someone else to do it for me
Setting up our Employee's Work Schedule is huge. Even after they all put in their availability, it takes a lot of time and work to fit everyone into slots that work for them and fill our schedule, and especially when one person changes their availability, often the whole schedule needs to change. It's a big time-suck.
Marketing. but I have yet to find an option to outsource it that isnt expensive or robotic feeling. the ability to schedule posts both on email/texts on square and on FB/insta has helped. i do most of it during slow times.
And lately trying to find in stock ingredients. (we are a bakery) i try to keep it to one store but its hard
I feel you on the ingredients! We have three main delivery companies, plus still have to get a couple things from local stores. I've started using Instacart for those last minute things we've run out of.
Accounting/Bookkeeping!! I used to do all of our payroll and taxes myself. I finally went with square payroll and an accountant to fo my year end taxes last year and it was fully worth it. I am hoping to transfer more of the day to day responsibilities to my accountant this year.
Stock management, headache for us Pubs & Restaurants!
Adding item weights for website RTS
Definitely inventory- we carry thousands of products and optimizing them for the website is tedious and the one thing we cannot outsource- everything else we could, we have.
Entering everything in inventory for the first time.
Bookkeeping. I spend hours each week doing redundant tasks entering information into QuickBooks that I already have in Square. It would be great if Square would add basic expense tracking to the Square for Retail platform. Donโt need 95% of what QuickBooks provides but donโt have a choice. Since I use purchase orders Square has the expense information already for the most part but no way to get it as a report in an accounting format. The income from sales information is already there. Just need basic expenses like cost of goods, rent , utilities, insurance, etc to bring it all together. I would definitely be willing to pay a little more for that capability since I am already paying separately for QuickBooks and commerce sync every month
Doing month end reports for my bookkeeper are tedious and time consuming. On my old system I could automate to send (email) pdf reports to the bookkeeper and/or anyone else. Now I have to do all manually for 5 stores, a real pain honestly and I thought my 10 year old system was antiquated.
Social media for sure! Gosh I suck at being consistent
Yes! Consistency is my downfall also...
SOCIAL MEDIA. It is extremely time-consuming but so necessary.
Thinking about the 20% reserve account that square is holding. I cannot believe in this climate that this is something to contend with. 3 % maybe 5 % maybe but 20 and 30% to me is just something that leaves the morals of the company on the table. Sorry not sorry . I spend to much time being aggravated with that. Your response ? Ty
Entering PO's and creating items after markets. And then adding them to the website when the items arrive.
For me, its making my own haircare products, that are in demand often along with stocking inventory, & mopping the salon floors. Those things tend to be the most time consuming but definitely necessary to help keep my business running.
Marketing and social media- coming up with unique things to say that bring people in at just the right interval so it's not annoying.
Inventory
Daily Marketing (Coffeshops/Smoothie/bars/restaurants)
Inventory & Bookkeeping ๐
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