7 Small Business Templates You Should Be Using Already

Small business owners who are in the early growth stage of their mission to create a profitable business of their own really need all the help they can get. With so much to do and so many small yet important everyday tasks involved in running your own business, small business templates are one of the things that can help automate some of their most important processes.

Here’s a list of seven excellent business-related templates that will come in handy to any and every small business owner looking to simplify his or her everyday tasks.

Job Descriptions

Getting the right employees all starts with the job ads that you create when trying to find them. A job description needs to be very clear and concise. Potential employees want to know what is going to be expected of them. They also want to be able to easily determine from reading your job description whether or not they qualify for the position.

The better your job description is, the better your candidates will usually end up being. Workable has a fantastic database of job descriptions for a huge variety of standard positions across many industries. These small business templates give you a great starting point for crafting your own job descriptions if you’re not sure where to start.

Business Plans

If you’ve decided to start a business of your own, you obviously already have some type of small business plan in mind. However, it’s important to turn those ideas into a document that will help you navigate the road to success.

A good business plan should be used as a concrete roadmap that’s going to clearly define all of the goals that you want to achieve with your business over any given period of time. Not only are business plans important for internal use, they are absolutely mandatory if you’re going to seek investors or partners to help fund your business endeavors.

Inc.com offers a fantastic assortment of small business plan templates that you can download for free.

Employee Scheduling Small Business Template

If you’re reading this blog post, then you probably already know a little bit about employee scheduling and how important good employee scheduling practices are to the success of your small business.

If your workforce is confused, coming in late or not showing up for shifts, there’s a good chance you are losing a lot of money due to faulty employee scheduling that does a poor job of keeping everyone on the same page.

Not ready to commit to an online employee scheduling solution like Humanity just yet? In the meantime, you can download our free employee schedule template and use that to organize your staff shifts better.

Invoices

Running a small business essentially boils down to paying others for products and services that are going to enable you to offer products and services to the public for which they will eventually pay you. Well, it’s more complicated than that; but no matter what, you’re going to need a lot of invoices.

Just like with many of these other processes, automated invoice software exists if you really want to simplify the process. But if you don’t have the money or need for something like that right off the bat, getting some good invoice templates to use should be a good start.

Microsoft Office offers tons of great templates for free. Their invoice templates are especially good.

Partnership Agreements

One of the things we talked about recently in our guide to local marketing for small businesses is the need to form relationships and partnerships with other local businesses that can be mutually beneficial.

If you plan on doing something like that on a serious level, you’re going to have to draft up a partnership agreement. And while it’s good to be able to create one yourself, it’s always a better idea to hire a lawyer to look it over before actually sending the document to your would-be business partners.

It’s no surprise then that Rocket Lawyer is an excellent place to start when looking for partnership agreement templates.

Marketing Plans

Just like the earlier mentioned small business plans, it’s important to have a marketing plan in place when defining your business’ strategies for getting your name out to the public. Your marketing plan should provide you with a blueprint that’s going to highlight all of your most important advertising and marketing efforts over a certain period of time.

The marketing plan should include a list of goals along with the actions and steps you are going to take in order to achieve them. It should also help you to identify your customers and work towards understanding their wants and needs.

This guide from the Australian Department of Industry, Innovation and Science gives you excellent small business templates and additional resources for putting together a good marketing plan.

Employee Reviews

Managing your employees is a process in and of itself that you’re going to have to handle on your own if you’re not at a level yet where you can hire an HR manager to deal with it for you.

Employee reviews are a necessary process if you want to maintain a productive workforce that strives to develop and grow along with the company. It’s also a very important part of keeping communication lines between management and employees open in order to encourage staff development, happiness and ultimately, retention.

MIT’s Human Resources website has great employee review forms available for free download.