Preparing your business for a new year

With a fresh new year, now is the best time to review your business and get it ready for the new year. It can be hard to stick to new year resolutions, mostly because people don’t actually make them until it’s too late – if your goals and aims are already in place, you’re more likely to stick to them.

To start with, there’s a few things you can review now, to make your start to January a little easier.

• Tie up loose ends – now is a great time to complete those pesky little items on your to-do list that you’ve been putting off, then you can start the new year with an empty list.

• Make sure you send email updates to inform your customers of any changes to your business that may have occurred over the holidays.

• Make sure all your tech is working and is up to date.

How do I prepare my business for the new year?

• Take some time to reflect on the past year and think about what went well and what you could improve on. Your best lessons in life come from mistakes so use this time to think about why things went wrong and take the changes in to the new year.

• Either review your current business plan or create a new one, a lot can change in a year so make sure your brand values and goals are still the same – and if not, change it! A good business plan will help to ensure your business stays on track and also can be helpful for yourself or your accountant to detect future tax planning opportunities that may lead to tax savings.

• A good marketing plan will go hand in hand with your business plan, it will help you to focus on the sales side of your business and decide what might work best for your business and reach new customers.

• Once you have your new year goals secured, you need to decide how you’re going to achieve them.

• Obviously, you will want to increase your profit, but by reviewing your finances for the year, you might stumble across other opportunities within your business. Through forward planning, tax efficiencies could be achieved if costs are incurred at the right time of year.

• Again, update technology – see if there’s any improvements or upgrades you could make that will help you to run your business smoothly – perhaps in terms of accounting software (Cloud Accounting etc).

• If you’re used to running things alone and things seem to be getting on top of you, perhaps consider our services such as HR consultancy or Payroll etc – this will allow you the peace of mind knowing your business finances are taken care off so you can do what you do best.

You’ll want to go into the new year with nothing on your to-do list and a clear vision of what you want your business to achieve. Sometimes trial and error is sometimes the best way, a new year may be the best time to test some new techniques out to see if they could work even better for you.

If you need any help with any business services such as HR, Payroll, Bookkeeping etc, please do not hesitate to get in contact with us and we can offer advice and guidance.