Small businesses, billing systems and my ‘MacGyver’ complex

I’m a bit of a Richard Dean Anderson, that is to say, the resourceful, problem-solving MacGyver part, not the intergalactic alien portal using, Goa’uld fighting StarGate part.

Yes, I am a real ‘do-it-yourselfer’. This may have stemmed from the fact that I was exposed to high volumes of MacGyver reruns during my formative years or the fact that I have been afflicted, since birth, with a debilitating condition known as single-minded stubbornness. Armed with a paperclip, a stick of gum and a small ripe cantaloupe I can usually solve complex algorithms, jimmy locks on baddie hideout doors and generally fix, overcome and triumph over any problem that life throws at me.

This is more than true when it comes to the way I run my small businesses.

Before we continue let’s just get this out of the way: I’m not the most organized person in the world. My filing looks like something out of a horror flick, most of my other admin skills rate just as poorly and I have not seen my desk in over a year. I mean, I know it’s there, I work at it every day, but I haven’t actually SEEN it in quite a while due to the mountains of ‘stuff’ I have carefully accumulated, stacked and balanced on it. Pair this with that fact that because my business is small my job title, on a good day, is something like ‘general-operations-admin-marketing-development managing-consultant-supervisory-director and tea lady’ and you can see where I’m coming from.

But, hailing from the MacGyver school of thought, I’m always ready to make a plan, improvise and get the job done – no matter how meager my resources are. I am therefore usually able to keep everything together with determination, my paperclip, stick of gum and cantaloupe– even if most things are perpetually seconds away from total collapse and disaster!

Now there came a point, I can’t exactly remember when, where I realized that I was averting the inevitable collapse or disaster with less and less time to spare on the clock. There was too much work to do, inefficient systems to do it with and too little time to waste on unproductive tasks. Like good old MacGyver, dramatic orchestral background music playing – sweat dripping from his perfectly styled mullet, I was defusing the disaster and stopping the countdown clock at 00:01.

I realized that I needed help. With my daily to-do list looking as long as the list of Abraham’s descendants my paperclip had, had a stress fracture, my gum had no more flavour left and my trusty CAN-taloupe was looking more and more like a CAN’T-aloupe. Something had to be done!

It is thus that I set about streamlining my daily operations. And the first order of business was to identify the problem areas in my business. After careful study I discovered the single most inefficient process in my business and the cause of my gargantuan to-do list.

My ‘do-it-yourself’ billing system. In true MacGyver style I had improvised a crude billing and client management system out of Excel spreadsheets, Outlook archives, Word documents and countless disheveled hardcopy files containing all manner of client, service, payment and billing information. This system was… um… unorthodox, but functioned averagely when the business had just started out, but two years on it was woefully inadequate!

Almost 50% of my day was spent manually issuing invoices and quotes, following up on payments, calculating overdue amounts on accounts, issuing warnings, tracking communications with clients and maintaining my database. No automated record keeping, no ‘quick search’, just thousands of records, reference numbers, payments and client accounts that all had to be managed, searched and maintained manually.

And so the reason for this blog is revealed – the search for a new billing system! But I can’t do it alone. I’m sure there are countless other small business owners out there that, just like me, suffer from MacGyveritis. Their affliction may vary in severity, but I’m sure if I can locate an efficient, affordable system, implement it and share my results. I may just be able to save a few lives and small businesses!