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The small business funding process works in the same way that the mortgage on a house works. However, you must submit more financial information to get small business funding. You need to have a checklist complete before you submit your application, and you should not start the application process if you do not have all your paperwork together.

Financial Statements
You will need bank statements for your business, and you may need statements for yourself. These statements together paint a picture for the funding company that allows them to determine how risk you are. You may not be asked to submit your personal bank statements, but you could be asked to if you are a sole proprietor of that business.

Tax Records
You need to submit your tax records to the lender, as well. These tax documents need to go back a few years, and they must show the lender if you have any tax liability. Tax liabilities are expenses you need to pay every month, and you will need to account for that when you are planning on paying the small business loan back.

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When you are trying to make your business operate in a streamlined format, you must make sure you start with your human resources and payroll departments. You can use new systems to make these changes, but you need to get small funding to pay for the new system.

Accounting and Payroll
Your accounting and payroll programs should fall under the same umbrella. When you are keeping your employee files and accounting information in the same place, you can make payroll easy. Also, you can transfer your employee information to the accounting program for the sake of simplicity.

Automatic Debits
When you are creating paychecks for your employees, you can use a program that will deduct benefit payments and taxes for you. The program will use the employee’s time clock information, benefit information and tax information to create an accurate paycheck. The system handles most o the math for your accountants, and they can reconcile the paychecks before they go out to your employees.

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If you are a local business, chances are that a great deal of your administrative work is done by you. In fact, completing the work that you need to every day in the back office can make for some very long days.

Fortunately, a host of tablet applications are now available that can cut time off the processes that are an integral part of your business.

Here are some of the best types of applications out there:

Accounting Applications
Most application providers have found that tablets are great for very focused applications that can simplify a process. They have also found that when you add a full-fledged financial or accounting application to a tablet, the complexity of the user interface and the number of options still favor using a larger screen to complete transactions. With that in mind, one of the stronger options that is out there in process simplification category is Shoebox, an application that allows you to use your tablet to take pictures of your receipts. You will never have to worry about looking for your receipts again. Moreover, after you have taken a picture of your receipt, the application will then perform OCR on the receipt, filing the receipts in an organized fashion for you right away. You will likely save a lot of time using Shoebox.

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You need funding to keep your business moving in the right direction, but you cannot get all that business funding alone. You need help from a company that specializes in funding small businesses, and you need to understand the many ways you can request these funds. Think about what you want to do this year with your business, and make sure you choose the right method to keep your business solvent.

Construction Funding
You can request funds to do construction for your business. You can use the funding to build an addition to your office, build a new structure or make improvements to your office. These construction loans often have different terms than traditional small business loans.

You will need to submit plans for the construction you want to do, and you will need to show why you need to complete this construction project. If you are prepared before you complete the application, you will be able to get your loan application to go through easily.

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When the winter holidays get close, your business needs to ave seasonal items to sell in the store. Your business may not be the type of business that adapts to the holidays very well, but you want to use the holiday spirit to make a few extra sales. As a small business owner, you need to make choices that work with your current stock. Also, you need to make choices that will profit your business greatly.

Candy
Everyone loves candy, and you should not be ashamed to sell candy in your store. You can put candy by your registers to help encourage impulse purchasing, or you can bring in a special type of candy that is quite expensive. People who visit your store may buy this candy when they are in the store simply because it is so nice. These are unexpected profits for your business, and the profits are easy to merchandise.

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Soon, the days of back-to-school shopping will be upon you. Since school wrapped up for the summer in June, your shelves have not seen much depletion of books, pencils, pens and the like, but you know that will all change shortly. You can plan for this major surge of customers starting now.

Don’t Waste Time
Advertisements for back-to-school shopping are already in the circulars and online. Also, plenty of shops have already started with their sales, so you need to start on your efforts as soon as possible. Developing new marketing campaigns is at the heart of this plan. Decide what the crux of this year’s sales will be. For example, you might want to use the basic premise of an old campaign, but expand it to include new technologies or styles of teaching. Reaching out to your target audience is crucial to do right now since other businesses already doing it.

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