What to automate to save time for both you and your client.
These three automations are a must-have from quite early on in your business:
Online Calendar
This is the very first thing to automize. It’s fairly easy to set up, and the free version of the online schedulers available covers the basic needs, so it doesn’t even need to cost you. Should you want features from the paid version, it’s a really small price per month for the benefits it brings:
- Any professional service business that has regular client calls need to have this in place. Doing it manually makes you look like a rookie.
- It saves both you and your client time
- You don’t need to do the entire email back and forth to find a time that you are both available.
- You don’t need to create a video call link, as the calendar software will do that for you.
- No double bookings
- No more “oh, I forgot to put it in the calendar” excuses from your noshow client
- With automatic email reminders to the client and yourself, there’s much less chance of “oh, I booked such a long time ago, and wasn’t sure we were still meeting” (seriously)
- It avoids misunderstandings about time and date, and miscalculations with regards to time-zone
Contract signing
- Having to print out a printer (do they have a printer)?
- Having to sign in and scan it (do they even have a scanner) or having to take a picture of the pages with their phone
- Then finally ready to send it to you (sometimes in bits and pieces as they could not figure out how to send it all in one document (oh dear)
Problem: Client finds the process tedious, and you need to wait until they feel like it.
Solution: Use an online signature software. It’s professional, no paper or printing is needed, it’s legal, it’s done in a few clicks, and it’s a breeze for the clients to go through the process. I have had several clients tell me that they just love how easy the contract signing part is with me, and are impressed with the system.
Invoicing
My first invoicing system was a self-made template in an Excel sheet. It worked ok, but what may happen:
- Invoicing number sequence is not consistent
- I managed to give the same invoice number to two different invoices, and my accountant gave me a frown.
- When the invoice doesn’t get paid, you have to write a personal email to the client reminding them of it, which is some cases feel awkward.
- An invoicing system allows for setting up automatic reminders, which for me gives me peace of mind. I don’t need to procrastinate writing that reminder email, trying to come up with other things to say before the “hey, where’s the payment” part, wondering if it makes my client feel bad, and if it will affect the working relationship
- Important information goes missing
- I have received invoices where the account number is missing, and then when asking for an invoice with the number, somehow the date had disappeared. It was an unneccesasry back and forth, frustrating for me, embarrasing for the service provider)
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