6 Business Templates to Keep in Handy
Every business wants to streamline its operations, and one of the best ways of doing that is by having pre-built templates. Whether it be social media templates for marketing or a pre-made video template for greetings , everything is of great importance. Here are some of the most important business templates you should have for your business.
Running a business entails many things. From drafting invoices and writing correspondence letters to clients and vendors to email marketing and posting on social media. All this can take a lot of time if you don’t have a pre-built templates. A template not only standardizes your business but also serves as a plug-and-play tool for handling your day-to-day business affairs. In this blog post, we’ll discuss the most important business templates you must have at your disposal at all times.
A Letterhead is a Must-have
Letterheads are an integral part of any business and will only become more significant in the years to come. Every company, big or small, must have an official letterhead. This is a document (usually made up of high-quality paper) with your company’s logo, name, and contact information printed on it. They let people know that you are really serious about your business, making a big impact on your success.
Every letter you send out to your clients, vendors, or employees should be on your letterhead — it makes your correspondence official. If you don’t have it already, here are some letterhead templates you can take inspiration from.
Email Templates Standardize Your Digital Communication
While your letterhead is used for official documentation and correspondence, it may not be used frequently since most business-related communication today is done online (mostly via email). Therefore, you must have a standardized email template for different purposes.
For instance, if a client requests your quote, you should ideally make a quotation on your letterhead, print it out, scan it, and send it over email. If it’s a preliminary quote, you could have a standardized email template in which you can plug in information about your quote and send it to the recipient. You can use PosterMyWall to create an email template in a few clicks.
Invoice Templates are a Life-saver
Imagine how unprofessional it would seem if you sent your client a monthly invoice that looks different every month. The basic purpose of any template is to keep things consistent in your business operations, and the same applies to your invoicing/accounting department.
You must have a standard invoice template containing multiple fields, such as product description, MRP, tax amount, total amount, VAT number, contact information in the footer, and all the essentials of an invoice. You could either fetch a pre-built invoice template online or use MS Excel’s numerous invoice templates for free.
A Newsletter Template Keeps Customers Informed
If you’re a customer-focused company like an apparel brand or a retail store, you probably send out newsletters to your existing customers every week or 2 weeks to keep them informed about the latest updates, discounts, sales, and more.
Most businesses fail to understand that consistency is key to keeping your customer’s interest in your business intact. One of the ways of doing that is by using a standardized newsletter template from sites like PosterMyWall. This also entails having a similar structure to what your customers are used to seeing. For example, if you insert a few images after every couple of paragraphs, stick to that. Similarly, if you add bullet points about major updates about your products, don’t switch it to paragraph form in your next newsletter.
Manage Your Employees with a Time Card Template
One of the main things the HR department does is mark the attendance or hours of each employee so that they can be paid for the days they worked at the end of each month. But where is this attendance recorded? You need a time card for each employee to do that.
Your time card should be a sheet having 30–31 columns containing the list of all your employees marked present or absent for each day of the month. If you’re paying overtime to some employees, make sure you record their hours each day, so they can be calculated in their salary at the end of the month.
Minutes of Meetings Make Everything Tick
No business is complete without meetings. It’s in these meetings that you can discuss problems in business operations and future financial forecasts. Unless you have standardized minutes of meeting templates to record everything you discussed in each meeting, you and your team won’t be able to address the issues discussed in the last meeting.
This template should consist of the checklist of the milestones discussed in the previous meeting, so you can evaluate if you met them. It should also have a “notes” section that includes all the relevant points discussed in the present meeting, and then a final section about the goals to be achieved by the next meeting.
Some Final Thoughts
Templates make it easier to create documents while increasing efficiency and audience attention. It serves as a way to improve clarity and reduce mistakes or repetition, helping you focus on the most important issues. Templates provide a natural way of organizing information, helping learners avoid content overload, and incorporating best practices in usability right from the start.
Standardized templates are a must-have for making your business operations as seamless as possible. Without them, your business would seem unprofessional and give a bad impression to your clients. Most of your marketing relies on the consistency of your marketing collateral and whether your marketing messages are aligned with your brand identity. Therefore, pre-built templates can prevent scattering your efforts and give them a proper and singular direction, yielding powerful results.