What stages do your jobs go through?

I'm Baz and I help business owners reduce the amount of time wasted on administration by designing and refining processes and automating things.

Nearly all of us have to process orders or jobs of some kind. Sometimes that's easy - an order comes in, we pick an item off the shelf, stick it in a bag and shove it in the post. All done.

But sometimes, it's complicated. We write a quote, we prepare materials, we get a deposit, we start work. Then we track progress over several months. At some points, there are crises and we have to rip up the project plan and start all over again. There are staged payments, final payments, late payments.

So most businesses deal with orders or jobs or projects. But each of them deals with them differently.

What stages do your jobs go through? Do they have a nice simple flow - moving from left to right in an orderly journey? Or is it complicated - with decisions here and there that send it down different routes?

Drawing up a flowchart of your jobs and the stages they go through can be your first step to organising your business. Because once you know that, you can start getting other people to take some of the burden off your shoulders.