Where to start digitising a small business: a five-step checklist
If you know something should change but can’t tell what to change first, these five steps give you an order to work in.
Follow one working day from start to finish
Pick an ordinary day, neither your busiest nor your quietest. Follow one booking, one order or one payment from the moment a customer gets in touch to the moment the money is in the bank and the paperwork is filed.
Write down every step, who does it, and where the information goes: a notebook, a spreadsheet, a chat message, an app. At this stage, just make the map. Seeing the whole route on one page tends to raise the right questions on its own.
Mark where the same information gets typed twice
Go back over the map and mark every place where someone copies information from one place to another: from a message into a calendar, from an order form into an invoice, from the till into a spreadsheet for the accountant. Each of these costs time, and each is a chance for a typo, a missed booking or a wrong amount.
Mark the steps that only work when one particular person is at the desk, too. If customers can only book, pay or get an answer while someone is there, that limits how much work the business can take in.
List what you already pay for
Write down every app, subscription, device and account the business uses, and what each one is for. You’ll often find two tools doing the same job, a tool nobody opens any more, or a paid feature that would remove one of the steps you marked.
This list stops you from buying something new when the answer is a setting in something you already have.
Choose one first step
Look at the steps you marked and pick the one that costs the most time each week or causes the most mistakes. That’s your first step. Good first steps have three things in common:
- They’re used every daySo the benefit shows quickly.
- They’re small enough to finishAnd start using before you begin the next one.
- They don’t depend on everything elseBeing replaced first.
Before you consider custom software, check whether an existing app can handle the step. Often the right first move is setting up something off the shelf properly. Custom software makes sense when no app fits the way you work, or when the gaps cost your staff hours every week.
Plan the rest in order, and write it down
Put the remaining steps in order: what comes second, what comes third, and why. For each one, note whether existing software can handle it or something needs building, and roughly how much work it involves.
A written plan lets you compare quotes on the same terms, spread the work over time, and change direction without starting again.
While you’re at it, decide who owns what. Your domain, your data and the accounts the business depends on should be in the business’s name, whoever builds for you.
The checklist
- Follow one booking, order or payment from start to finish.
- Mark every place where information is typed twice.
- List every tool, subscription and device you pay for.
- Pick one first step that’s used every day.
- Write down the rest in order, with rough effort for each.
Want someone to do it with you?
This is what our Digital Audit does. In about a week, we go through a normal working day with you and your staff, on site or by video, review the tools you already use, and hand you a written roadmap in priority order, with a rough cost for each step. The roadmap is yours, whether you build with us, with another team or on your own.