How to make daily tasks easier or faster?

Hi fellow crafters. :smile:

Thought this would be the best place to ask this question. I am conducting a little Market Research for my college assignment. I hope you would be able to help?

I make photo albums mainly for new borns but some for holidays too. I know the process of collecting orders, processing customers, working out postage costs, different couriers, printing labels, order tracking, customer tracking etc etc.

For the likes of us working out our own tax returns too all this data is hard to track and working out total sales, accounts and tax etc at the end of the month or year is tiring and laborious. Even just the daily tasks of printing invoices etc eats up time. For this reason I went back to college to study web design, e-commerce and database design.

Here is where I want to pick your brains. What task or range of tasks do you perform as part of your business which eats up your valuable time? Do you sell through multiple channels and find it hard to track everything? Perhaps printing invoices for multiple platforms is slow also? Is it simply keeping track of your accounting?

Lets get a good discussion going.

For me, it’s listing and photography. I like to give as much information as possible and except for supplies, keep each listing unique to assist in google search. I would love if we could bulk upload. The only bulk listing at the moment on Folksy is shipping.

Is Folksy the only place you use to sell your wares? So what you would like to see is a system to put all your products,descriptions, prices etc and then be able to upload this to Folksy? Or are you looking for a system to store information on your orders and sales in a database on your computer?