Running a business in a tight market can be extremely difficult. If revenues are slim, you need to do everything in your power to bring down costs while not harming customer satisfaction simultaneously. This can be a very difficult juggling act for a business owner, but it may be the only way to survive.

Thankfully, there are tools at your disposal that can help bring overhead down and protect your company’s long term viability. One of these is to outsource certain business processes. Doing so can slash overhead and save time and resources for more important projects. The increase in efficiency can help save your bottom line. Below are four processes every new business should outsource.

Accounting

Creating a product and pleasing customers can be difficult enough on its own. What can be even more difficult and certainly more technical than this is handling the financial side of a business. Most business people are not professionally trained accountants. For a layperson, handling different accounting functions like bookkeeping can be very difficult and require a lot of time and practice.

Unfortunately, if mistakes are made with the company’s books, the penalties from the IRS can be extreme. Certainly choose accounting functions like bookkeeping as one of the first things you choose to outsource. It can prevent costly mistakes and help shift the liability for any mistakes that are made to a third party.

Shipping

Something else you should certainly outsource is your shipping. Ecommerce is growing at a phenomenal rate and will soon grow to $4 trillion in sales per year. If you want to get in on this trend, you need to ship out your products to consumers from an online store. The possibility of expanding your business beyond what is achievable with a brick and mortar location is massive.

However, the actual process of preparing products for shipping and sending them out in the mail is extremely time consuming. For one, each product may weigh differently and require different postage. Outsourcing your shipping processes to a third party can remove this frustrating part of ecommerce from your list of things you have to worry about. You can maybe even save some money if you work with a local foam fabricator salt lake city Utah on ordering your own bulk packing materials.

Customer Support

One of the keys to surviving for the long term as a company is growing a loyal customer base. You can’t do that without high customer satisfaction. One thing that can help ensure that customers always feel satisfied with your products is by providing them with dependable customer support services. Whether this support is provided over the phone or online, it requires having staff on hand to interact directly with customers

However, when you are a successful company, the sheer volume of support requests you may receive can be massive. It may take up most of your time. That’s not a good thing and can prevent your company from focusing on other projects like developing new products and marketing plans. Outsource your support services to an outside firm. This can allow your customers to get the support they need without it being as much of a drag on your overall efficiency.

Payroll

Human resources tasks like payroll are also prime candidates for outsourcing. While you can do these tasks in-house, HR personnel usually demand competitive salaries. Doing payroll on your own can also be extremely time consuming.

This is especially the case if you employ a large workforce. Not being able to pay employees on time because of the backlog of work to be finished in payroll is also unfair to your workers and may result in high turnover. Consider outsourcing payroll to save money, time and resources. While directly managing your employees is important, payroll is something that can be performed much more efficiently by an outside firm.

Running a business means being responsible for thousands of different tasks that must be completed on time. You cannot do it all on your own. You must delegate responsibility to get the job done. In certain cases, this involves outsourcing business processes to outside firms. Doing so can lower costs and increase efficiency.