Google Sheets is one of the best business tools you can use. The tool is a versatile and time-tested spreadsheet productivity software, offering businesses a great amount of flexibility in tracking, organizing, and evaluating important data.
In this post, you’ll learn great ways on how to use Google Sheets to grow your business and make it successful. But first, let’s go through the potential benefits of Google Sheets.
Everyone Can Use Google Sheets
Everyone can use Google Sheets to automate business. For instance, marketers can easily track campaign goals and results, producers can easily manage an editorial calendar, and SEO experts can perform backlink and keyword research.
Mastering Google Sheets will allow you to maximize this free tool to automate your business. Just imagine tracking your inventory of stocks and supplies a lot easier using Google Sheets. Create a master list and allow authorized people to access view, or edit files for tracking purposes.
Here are some benefits you can get from mastering Google Sheets:
- Import Data Into Sheets: You don’t have to input data into Google Sheets manually. There are tools you can use, such as Supermetrics, Zapier, and Blockspring, to export CSV files from tools, such as Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, or Moz, and import files into Google Sheets.
- Turn Raw Data Into Useful Insights: By automating your data process, you can save tons of time, turning data into actionable insights. To achieve these benefits, learn more about Google Sheets formulas and make your Google Sheets experience a lot easier and more beneficial.
- Make Data Readable And Usable: After inputting raw data into Google Sheets, you can turn this data into useful information for your team. A great combination of tables and charts will allow you to communicate data to your target audience effectively. What’s more, it’s possible to build dashboards, tables, and charts directly within Google Sheets.
Create Budgets And Keep Track Of Expenses
The core functions of any spreadsheet tool include creating budgets and keeping track of expenses. When it comes to financial accounting, Google Sheets can help your business by providing helpful templates for creating monthly or yearly expense reports, budgets, and more. You can easily modify these templates according to your specific business needs.
Manage Projects
Spreadsheets are perfect for small or medium project management. Project managers can use Google Sheets for better access to a project management plan.
Here’s how Google Sheets can help you with project management:
- Google Sheets is a great way to track details of different marketing strategies, which can be easily shared with your marketing team via a Google link for viewing, editing, or both.
- Keep track of budgets, events, people, and resources scattered across several locations.
Create Schedules and Calendars
You can use a spreadsheet to create a schedule or calendar. Use a spreadsheet to create customized schedules and calendars that meet the exact needs of your business. Customize creations by daily, weekly, or monthly time formats based on useful intervals.
Here are the steps on how to use Google Sheets when creating schedules and calendars:
Create a Schedule
- Go to Google Sheets, and click on “Template Gallery” to view all available templates.
- Select the “Schedule” template to create a blank spreadsheet using the customized template. You can use this template every week. Simply change the starting date to preserve the weekly workflow without re-entering it.
- You can set the starting date and the rows will automatically update, fetching the correct days of the week and dates. Use color-coding for better task management for recurring tasks or meetings. Use conditional formatting to generate colors to automate task labeling.
Create a Calendar
Make a monthly or yearly calendar in Google Spreadsheets by including monthly tabs that you can update. You can use the same outline every year by simply duplicating the file to create a formatted schedule. The only thing you need to update manually is the tab for the ‘Holiday’ so you can highlight them on your yearly calendar.
Prepare Employee Assignments
Google Sheets allow you to achieve flexible work assignments for smoother business operations. You can prepare employee tasks or assignments from several hours when done as manual work down to a couple of minutes through Google Sheets.
For instance, if you handle a publishing company, you can draw raw data using a data extraction tool and assign article topics to freelance writers through Google Sheets with deadlines affixed. It’s an excellent way of managing the editorial process to ensure a smooth flow of task assignments and completion.
Here are some examples of how to use Google Sheets to achieve better online business operations:
- Raw Data: Use the Blockspring add-on to pull up the data from Google Analytics into Google Sheets.
- Formulas: Determine the top-performing landing pages and acquisition channels using a QUERY formula.
- Visualization: Create a table with the results on one quadrant and another to write your key insights and the insights of other team members in the next columns.
Employee Time Tracking
If you’re starting a business, it might not be advisable to invest in expensive time tracker software right away. One free and effective way to keep track of hours that employees have worked each day is using Google Sheets. Also, Google Sheets makes a great template for creating employee shift schedules, too.
Here’s how you can use Google Sheets for employee time tracking:
- You can create a master sheet of employee time cards.
- Create tabs for each employee of your small business. You can do this step by simply clicking on the plus sign or ‘add sheet’ located on the left lower part of the Google Sheet screen.
- Open and close Google Sheets, and all data will still be available online because it’s backed up in the cloud. As a result, you don’t have to worry about your employees losing their time card or deleting it from their computers.
Purchase Orders and Invoicing
If you need to create custom purchase orders or invoices, you can use any available template in Google Sheets to fit the unique requirements of your business. Users can download a PDF file document copy, which is a universally accepted document format and perfect for email or print-outs.
Data Analysis
Advanced users can use Google Sheets with pivot tables for an in-depth analysis, narrowing down a large data set and analysis of data points. For instance, you can use a pivot table in analyzing the salespeople who brought the highest revenue on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis.
Data visualization is powerful in data analysis. Google Sheets include different formats for graphs and charts. Moreover, Google Sheets provide helpful report templates. Using graphs, charts, and reports will help you present your ideas in an organized and appealing way. You can download these presentations as a PDF or print them directly for easy distribution.
Automate Your Ecommerce Funnel
The power of Google Sheets allows you to speed up the tracking, analysis, and comparison process. You can automate your e-commerce funnel by tracking web traffic and sales. Also, you can measure an affiliate campaign’s success by calculating the conversion rates from the landing page to the checkout or purchase page.
By comparing the funnel metrics of each affiliate, you can track results and easily identify “weak links.” In this way, you can focus your efforts on other parts of your business that need improvement. By doing so, you can boost your visit-to-purchase rate sooner.
Do Many More Things With Google Sheets
Google Sheets look and function like other spreadsheet tools. But it’s an online app that offers more features and benefits than others. Google Sheets work as a mobile or web-based core app from any device, that can be bundled with Google Drive, Slides, and Docs to share documents, presentations, and files online.
There are many things you can do with Google Sheets. You can download add-ons for smarter and more automated Google Sheets. Also, you can write custom code to create your own add-ons. Gather data with Google Sheets automatically even when it is not open.
Here are the most common spreadsheet terminologies to help you understand Google Sheets a lot better, so you can do more tasks with the app:
- Cell: A single element or data point in a spreadsheet
- Column: It refers to a vertical set of cells.
- Row: It pertains to a horizontal set of cells.
- Function: It’s a built-in operation that is used in calculating a cell, column, row, or range values, for data manipulation and more.
- Range: It refers to a selection of cells that extend across a column, row, or both.
- Formula: It pertains to the combination of functions, rows, columns, cells, and ranges to get a specific result.
- Spreadsheet: It pertains to the entire document that contains your worksheets. A single spreadsheet can have several worksheets.
- Worksheet (or Sheet): It refers to the named sets of columns and rows that make up the spreadsheet.
Conclusion
By using Google Sheets, you can do a lot of things to make your business grow and become more successful. You can automate your business by assigning tasks, monitoring employee schedules, tracking marketing progress, and determining sales using this powerful Google tool.
