Google Sheets is a robust spreadsheet program. Best of all, it’s completely free. Google Sheets can improve productivity for your business in multiple ways, from plotting out reports to drawing out budgets and milestones.
1. Create a Calendar for Your Business
A business calendar will help you track your most important events. Businesses need to track a lot of things: bill payments, holidays, and more.
Google comes with built-in calendar templates for every year, so you don’t need to figure out each month one by one. And there are templates available everywhere for each individual month, too. With a little work (and some data functions), you could even have your calendar automatically detect what days of the month have passed.
2. Perform Basic Project Management
What projects and tasks are your employees currently working on? In Google, you can sort each project by tab, and assign each individual task. You’ll be able to track employee time and milestones and use the sheet to determine which tasks are on schedule and which tasks are falling behind.
You can even use more advanced functions to sort by date. And because everyone likely knows how to use Google Sheets, you won’t need to teach everyone a new task management program.
3. Make (and Share) a To-Do List
On the simpler side, you can also just create a to-do list. One of the major benefits of using Google Sheets is that it’s very easy to share files. At the beginning of each week, create a shared to-do list for your organization of tasks that have to get done. You can even prioritize them so people know what to work on first.
Remember, if there’s anything you need to do in Google Sheets, you don’t need to start creating it yourself. Look at the available templates first; you’ll almost always have some options.
4. Track Employee Time and Billing
If you allocate employee time to given clients, or if you have hourly employees, you may want to use Google Sheets to track either employee time or billable hours. Employees can enter their hours in a shared Google Sheet and then you can calculate their pay based on county, state, and federal taxes. Tracking employee time and billable hours is incredibly important and it’s one of the more complex tasks a business owner needs to complete.
5. Send Out Bills and Invoices
How do you get paid without bills and invoices? Google Sheets makes it easy to create bills and invoices, store them, and send them out. You can create a fast invoice and mail it — and sort your invoices by paid and unpaid. You can even create a sheet and then use a mail merge function in Docs to create a bunch of bills at once, though that’s a little more advanced.
6. Perform Basic Database Functions
Google provides some pretty powerful database functions, such as LOOKUP, VLOOKUP, and HLOOKUP. With these database functions, you’ll be able to automatically comb through large volumes of data for the answers that you’re looking for. You can also automate the process of mining through data so you can get information more quickly each time.
7. Analyze Your Organization’s Data
Google Sheets has many excellent analytical functions and charting functions that can help you dig deep into your organization’s profit and loss, income, cash flow, and investments.
Your company can become a more productive one by analyzing the amount of time spent on each project, how successful each project was, and which projects were most profitable. The more analysis you do, the better.
8. Share Files Between Employees
One of the major advantages of Google Docs is you can share files with everyone. Employees. Vendors. Contractors. Anyone. So, you’ll be able to easily share documents and information without having to struggle to find the right file format. If you want to be able to quickly collaborate and communicate, the entire Google Suite makes it a breeze.
9. Use Your Files From Anywhere
Another productivity-building feature is that you can use your files anywhere. You can use them offline if you enable offline more, or you can use them automatically anywhere you have computer access. They’re stored on the cloud, so you don’t need to have a server. You don’t even need to back them up! This improves productivity significantly; files aren’t lost and they can always be returned back to an older revision.
With Google Sheets, your organization will have a complete spreadsheet and data analysis program — and a powerful one at that. While there are some limitations (and times it’s better to just have a database), most tasks can be accomplished with a little extra work.
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This content is brought to you by Franco Colomba.
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