Business Growth Series: Productivity & Organization Tools for Handmade Businesses

As your business continues to scale and grow, managing your time and using the right productivity and organization tools is essential. Your time is valuable, and anything you can do to automate things in your business, the more time you have to spend on revenue-generating activities and things you love to do.

Project Management Tools

There are so many options for setting up a project management system for your handmade business, including Asana, ClickUp, Trello, and Monday. These tools are excellent for managing everything in your business - social media marketing, content calendars, order fulfillment, and administrative tasks.

All of the previously mentioned tools have a lot of the same features; it is mostly a matter of figuring out which one works best for you and setting it up properly, so you use it consistently.

Social Media Productivity Tools

Social Media is a great marketing tool for handmade businesses, but if you aren’t careful, it can become a time suck.

Do you ever find yourself on Instagram and then suddenly realizing an hour has gone by? Yeah, social media can do that to you if you don’t have a set time and strategy behind scheduling and planning your content.

The best tools to help you do that are social media schedulers, such as Later, Planoly, or Hootsuite, that can help you create and batch schedule your social media posts.

Shipping Tools

One of my favorite time saving tools is ShipStation, it allows you to important orders from multiple sources - Etsy, Amazon and Shopfy so you can batch print and ship your orders from all places at once. As you continue to grow and get more and more orders coming in, you need to have a process in place to streamline your shipping and order fulfillment processes.

Bookkeeping Tools

Another tool you will need to use as you continue to grow is the proper bookkeeping and accounting apps. Making sure your business finances, income and expenses are organized is essential for business planning and knowing how your cash flow is going.

A few of the most popular and best tools are QuickBooks or FreshBooks.

Taking the time out to set these tools up the first time is time-consuming, but you will thank yourself later on for getting this system in place and set up early in your business.

Other Productivity Tools

A few other productivity and organizational tools I wanted to mention are Zapier and RescueTime. 

Zapier is an incredible tool that connects so many websites and apps with each other seamlessly. If something in your business can be automated, Zapier is the thing you need to make it happen! Think about all of the little things that you are doing manually right now, how can you automate those annoying little recurring tasks? Zapier!

RescueTime is a Google Chrome browser extension that tracks what you are doing online. If you are someone who never knows what you’ve accomplished at the end of the day and time just seems to slip away from you, RescueTime can help you figure out where you are spending your time and make adjustments as needed.

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Stay tuned as my next post in the Business Growth series is another one that will help you with being more productive -- we’ll be diving into outsourcing and hiring for your handmade business!