The admin that has to happen every week
Admin for a one person business is not hard. It is just always losing to something more urgent, and it compounds quietly until a Sunday in January disappears into a carrier bag of receipts.
The version that works is short, weekly, and always at the same time. Not because routine is virtuous, but because a job you do every Friday takes twenty minutes and the same job done every quarter takes a day and a half.
Friday, forty minutes
Five things, in this order, because the order puts the money first while you still have the energy.
Invoice everything finished this week. Not next week. An invoice sent on the Friday of the week the work finished gets paid noticeably sooner than one sent a fortnight later, partly because of the date and partly because the customer still remembers being pleased.
Look at what is owed. Anything past its due date gets a nudge today, and the nudge on day one is the one that works. Two minutes, and it is the highest paid two minutes in the week.
Deal with receipts. Everything in the van, everything in the jacket, photographed and filed. This is the one that turns into three hours if left, because a receipt from six weeks ago has to be identified as well as filed. Write the job on each one as it is filed; that is what turns a bag of receipts into what each job actually left you.
Send the quotes you owe. Anything you priced this week and did not send. Anything on day twenty eight of its expiry that needs a follow up. The follow up is the job most people never do and it wins work.
Look at next week. Materials ordered, access arranged, and the jobs grouped by geography rather than by who rang first. Half an hour here saves more driving than anything else you can do, and driving is unbillable time.
What can wait for the month
Reconciling the bank. Bookkeeping proper. Reviewing what you charged against what jobs actually took. Chasing anything that has gone past the nudge stage and needs a formal reminder.
These are genuinely monthly jobs. Doing them weekly is fussing, and fussing is how a routine gets abandoned.
What can wait for the quarter
The VAT return, if you are registered. A look at your real hourly rate against what you assumed when you set your prices. And a scan for the customers who are quietly costing you money, which needs a few months of data to be visible at all.
Why Friday
Any fixed slot beats no slot, but Friday has two things going for it.
The week is fresh. You can still remember what happened on Tuesday, which matters for invoicing and for receipts. Do it on Monday instead and you are reconstructing a week that has already blurred.
And it clears the weekend. The value of admin is not only that it gets done; it is that you stop carrying it around. A Friday afternoon that ends with nothing outstanding is worth more than the forty minutes it cost.
The arithmetic of not doing it
Twenty minutes a day of scattered, reactive admin, which is what happens without a slot, is one hour forty a week and about 77 hours a year. Most of it is not admin at all: it is looking for something, or redoing something, or starting a task and being interrupted.
A single weekly session of forty minutes is 31 hours a year and covers the same ground, because doing one thing five times in a row is faster than doing five things once each, and because a receipt filed today needs no identifying.
That is roughly a working week a year, recovered from a routine rather than from working harder.
When you fall behind anyway
You will. A bad fortnight, a job that overran, and suddenly there are three weeks of receipts and two uninvoiced jobs.
Do not attempt to catch up in order. Deal with the money first and the history second, because they are not equally urgent. Invoice the outstanding jobs today, this morning, before anything else. Nudge anything overdue. Those two take half an hour and they are the only parts with a cost attached to being late.
The receipts and the filing can wait for a wet afternoon. They are annoying rather than expensive, and treating them as equally urgent is what makes people abandon the whole routine: the backlog looks enormous, so Friday gets skipped again, and now it is five weeks.
Split the backlog from the routine. Restart the Friday session this week as though nothing had happened, and give the backlog its own separate slot. A routine that survives being interrupted is worth far more than one that only works when everything is going well.
Starting it
Put it in the diary as an appointment with a start time, and treat it the way you would treat a customer. The reason it does not happen is almost never that there is no time, it is that it never became a thing that is on at three o'clock.
Give it four weeks before deciding whether it works. The first one is horrible because it includes a backlog. The fourth is twenty minutes.