#157: Dealing with your business's endless administration burden

Bootstrapped Podcast
#1

Ed and Steve discuss the endless burden of busy-work that comes with running a business – and how we try to minimise it.

We also mention Ed’s new marketing-related hire, Feature Upvote‘s dashboard design overhaul, and using a content agency to write blog posts for Saber Feedback.

The invoice handling service we mentioned is GetMyInvoices.

You can also listen and subscribe here: https://bootstrapped.fm/157-dealing-with-your-businesss-endless-administration-burden/

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#159: Enterprise sales hell, SEO frustration and self-doubt
#2

I had this a bit of ambiguous idea to try to start a movement to get all the vendors to implement vendors to add the billing into their Zapier integration or just plain webhooks so you can really automate all of this.

Please feel free to steal this :slight_smile:

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#3

One method to minimize tax admin is to use a reseller like paddle.com instead of just a payment processor like stripe. This reduces my VAT tax handling burden substantially.

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#4

I’d love to get someone from Paddle’s leadership onto the podcast. I could get them to explain the pros and cons, with a slightly combative albeit friendly host.

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#5

Good episode guys. This has been on my mind this year. It seems every few weeks I lose a full day to customer support and admin, and still don’t get to the bottom of my to-do list. Those tasks hanging over me, even if not urgent, then add a mental load and start burning me out.

It’s still a work in progress, but some things I have done so far

  • Got my accountants to start doing bookkeeping for me
  • I’m using receiptbank for my receipts, that can automatically get receipts for some vendors (aws I know works). For others I set rules in Gmail to tag and forward invoices directly to them and mark as read. Also, mobile app for coffees etc.
  • I’ve hired a va to update a bunch of spreadsheets for me each month. I use these to track key metrics for each app, not sure if there is a better approach but for now it’s manual but I no longer do it.

The above has freed up a bunch of time. Otherwise at least once a month I was spending a day or more on this stuff. Or just not doing it. It’s an ongoing process though!

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#7

oh, that would make a very interesting episode! Have you tried getting in touch with them already?

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#8

Have you looked at apps like Profitwell or Chartmogul for metrics overviews? I think one of those might be more efficient than having a VA update spreadsheets manually.

#9

I’ve got profitwell set up, but I also want to look at stats from google analytics, plus some custom stats we track for our apps. So this is about have a record for all of them in one place.

I could be convinced that I am doing it wrong, but for now this is how we do it!

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#10

I do this too, at the beginning of each month. I don’t mind doing it.

I find the process of manually copying data from ChartMogul, Google Analytics, and our admin dashboard into Google Sheets helpful for getting the info to stick in my head.

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