Running your own business can make you feel chained to the office and unable to travel. But whether it’s for business or pleasure, chances are you’ll need to travel and find ways to manage your business whilst on the move.
If you’ve got a trip coming up and you’re worried about how you’ll keep your business running smoothly whilst you’re away, here are five essential tips.
Make your accounts accessible
When running your business at home, it’s easy to check on your accounts and ensure everything is in order and running smoothly. When you travel elsewhere, however, you may not have the same access you had before.
By investing in accountancy software, you’ll have full access to all your accounts and have the ability to create, send and track invoices as well as manage your tax compliance no matter where in the world you might be. This approach means pushing your business forward despite travelling overseas.
Plan a schedule and stick to it
Maintaining a schedule whilst travelling can be difficult, especially if you are often on the move. A schedule that you can stick to but that offers enough flexibility in case you can’t work will help both you and your employees’ productivity.
When creating your schedule, you should consider factors like your availability to your employees should they need to contact you and whether or not different time zones will affect this.
Invest in VoIP phones
In the office, your business probably has a dedicated landline telephone number through which you can speak to clients, customers, or partners. When you travel, your only phone devices will be your laptop and your mobile. This can make communicating over the phone more difficult.
Clients cannot easily be routed to you and the calls you make will be from a personal device rather than a professional number.
The easiest way around this is to invest in VoIP desk phones for your business.
This technology makes calls over the internet, meaning you can make and receive business calls from anywhere, calls can always be routed to your mobile or laptop, and you can continue to use your professional business phone number even on your personal devices.
Keep lines of communication open
The last thing any business owner wants is to feel cut off from their employees when they travel. Even if you’re on the other side of the world and rarely working at the same time as your staff, it’s vital that communication lines are kept open and you can be reached anywhere at any time.
Given how many offices went remote due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s likely that you and your team quickly adjusted to communicating online. Even so, this list of the best virtual communication tools for businesses offers a rundown of the best platforms out there for ensuring that you and your staff can remain in touch whilst you travel.
Ensure your business can run smoothly without you
You can plan as much as possible, but managing your business whilst travelling is never without its risks. You could lose internet access, get stuck in airports, or even lose your luggage and laptop.
The best way to ensure your business doesn’t fall apart when you travel is to ensure it runs smoothly without you. That way, if anything does go wrong you can rest easy that your staff are managing your business just fine.
