What aspect of running your business takes the most time out of each day? 🤔

[isabelle]

Hi all! Hope everyone is having a fabulous last week of September! 

Today we're wondering....

What aspect of running your business takes the most time out of each day? 🤔

Excited to read your replies! ⚡️

[ShippingBYeli]

Administrative work. Balancing the daily operations with invoicing and vendor management can be tough to do during the work day. Finding myself operating the business daily and then spending hours at night or the early morning to make sure the invoices, payroll, accounts payable..etc are completed without error. Hustle hard!!

[pessosices]

Great question @isabelle !

Other than the obvious "real work" of being up front serving & doing the ice cream making, and training employees.

Payroll used to be the biggest and most annoying, but with Square Payroll, it only takes me about 2 minutes every 2 weeks, which is incredible.

The current biggest behind the scenes time investment is putting together the employees schedule. It's a massive puzzle trying to match everyone into time slots that work for us and them, and there are constant changes that take constantly rearranging the entire schedule. We use Homebase since it's the most robust solution out there, but definitely looking forward to Square's new Scheduling feature growing and expanding and hopefully making the process easier!

[successtaurant]

Hi Pesso, I'm a restaurant consultant who uses Square and recommends it to nearly all of our clients. Are you using the Square Team App for your scheduling and employee communications? Find out more about it here: https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7155-scheduling-with-team-management

[pessosices]

Hey @successtaurant - thanks! 

Yup, I’m a massive square user and recommender! 

I use Square Teams for just about everything, and Homebase for scheduling. I’ve been pre-alpha, alpha, and beta testing Square Scheduling and I’m looking forward to hopefully features being added to make it as robust as Homebase, and the day I can switch it all over! 

[successtaurant]

Got it! Sounds like you're on the right track. Hopefully the square product team gets the final product rolled out sooner than later! 

[bfcoffee]

We've been testing Square scheduling as well, but so far it's only helpful for time off requests- we don't like the scheduling part itself, yet. Much easier to see all at once and make edits in our shared google calendar, of all things. I'm sure it'll get there eventually, but it's not there yet.

[DebutSalon01]

Answering texts and emails. Getting clients booked and confirming appts

[NEWBBF]

Talking to customers. they arent listening and they say huh all the time.. 

[9900]

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@isabelle wrote:

Hi all! Hope everyone is having a fabulous last week of September! 

Today we're wondering....

What aspect of running your business takes the most time out of each day? 🤔

Excited to read your replies! ⚡️

---

I run a stationery boutique and I spend 2 hours on emails before I open the store. Then it's constantly checking it throughout the day. Then another hour after work just to make sure Ive responded to everyone. Then it's reconciling and synching the inventory with my brick and mortar store with  the online store. All this notwithstanding the running of the day to day with my team and customers. I work a 6-10 hour day at the store but I work another 4-5 at home. Oh and then of course I have to find the inventory which comes from hours of online research.:-)

[ShippingBYeli]

Hustling hard for sure. If you do a lot of shipping we offer discounted rates for businesses. Using about a million dollar spend with the carriers to help small businesses save. We have been able to save small businesses in the past so much they could afford to hire an admin to help with some of the things you are talking about, or just hire someone to do all of your shipping with the savings. We have started offering the same service with Uline, at $500 we get free shipping plus we have negotiated rates on box types. Volume us king! I'm hoping in the future we can help more small business owners save on shipping/packaging so they can hire and retain others to keep their sanity. 

[TCSlaguna]

Reordering products, receiving items, tagging them. 

If Vendor -> Item Library had a  Quantity on Hand column, it would save us hours a week. 

I have faith however that the feature will come 😉

[TheGoodHop]

Great question....

I spend a ridiculous amount of time reconciling inventory in Square. We have to constantly make re-count changes because there is no parent/child inventory option. We probably spend anywhere from 2-5 hours every single day recounting inventory so that the counts on the online store aren't messed up from the physical sales from the brick and mortar store.

Re-counts and item details are entered and saved, but the next day it's as if they were not saved or parts were not saved ie the description is missing but the count is there, the inventory count showed as saved but is back at zero the next day with no sales, item was marked as available on the online side and the next day is no longer available even though the inventory has a positive count.

Our inventory is HUGE (roughly 6k items with 550 live at any time and every item has two different quantities/versions) and has been baffling for all of my contacts at Square. I would love to talk to someone who could look at our inventory and maybe see a different solution. Any help greatly appreciated.

[_Brandon_]

A large inventory and Square do not seem to be the best of friends.  We have around 3000 Items published with about 1500 or so half done on the Woo Commerce based website.  The most frustrating part for us is that with vintage items so many are one time sales.  Even if we delete it from the website after its sold, we then have to manually go in and delete it in Square.  Luckily I feel like the inventory has been syncing okay so far.  Occasionally we spend hours looking for a part that shows in stock but is nowhere to be found, but not often enough that I can trace it to a specific person or program making the mistake.  If Square could follow the same category hierarchy that the website does it would save us a lot of time, but I won't punish that poor horse anymore!

[storytellerG]

I'm having similar inventory issues.

[bfcoffee]

Besides running the actual brick and mortar and managing employees, events, inventory, global relationships, local vendors, etc, I spend SO MUCH TIME now on managing online menus, marketing them, and doing social media. The doordash integration to push to our square register has really helped, but everytime I have any changes, in-and-out of season items, weekly food specials, or if we sell out of something, we are managing that across our own app, in-store, doordash, and square online. woof.

I also spend a ridiculous amount of time and effort trying to source and receive cups to serve drinks in, as all other beverage vendors are, I'm sure, with the shortages in paper and plastic disposables (no dishwasher in our location, and we aren't comfortable hand-washing our huge collection of real mugs yet). 

There are certainly things I spend less time on now, like with Square Payroll/Timecards, quickbooks integration, etc. 

[snowpacktaproom]

Processing Payroll with Square -- because they STILL don't have a way to split pooled tips based on shifts worked by employees, even when using Square Timecards.  It ends up taking me many hours to process payroll when I should just be able to click a button.

[Enso]

We would love for the "reports" to also be able to do some of the calculations or sum totals as well, they show up on the screen but don't export well.  Without these limitations, some of these tedious reports/payroll would be so much quicker, and that would be nice since Square is so "close" to it! 

[rtfulk]

Answering emails, we have everything they could possible want to know on the product page. We still get emails, how much is this, what size does this come in...etc. It's all on the product page.

[UniTees]

Since my business is so new (and small), I keep finding that I have to "re-set-up" certain aspects. Inventory, pricing, displays, etc. So, just getting things running smoothly right now is what takes up most of my time!

[JK_Fiber_Art]

We sell one of a kind handmade items - a small selection are available online however, those same items are available for purchase in our Studio Gallery.  If someone purchases one of those items in person that's great however, we then must remove that same item from the online shop as soon as possible.  It's not a game changer but, it takes a small bit of time to ensure that we don't run into an conflicts, so keeping our online shop up to date is important.  Since we are a very small business, to date, we have not experienced any issues with how our items are managed but, we have to pro-active which seems to work.

JK