SMEs waste thousands of hours on non-essential admin tasks
Posted on in Business News
UK SMEs spend over 600,000 hours a year on company administration rather than core business activities
Research carried out for the British Insurance Brokers' Association (BIBA) has revealed that a significant number of leaders of SMEs perform a lot of tasks outside their job descriptions, instead of outsourcing these to insurance brokers, recruiters or IT specialists.
These range from tasks such as fixing IT issues (26 %) to dealing with HR (23 %).
According to the survey, conducted by Populus, a quarter of SME leaders spend time on finding insurance and 26% find themselves dealing with IT issues, which cost them on average 52 hours a year. A further 27% of SME's spend nearly over 33 hours each year procuring office supplies - even though these are not part of their core job descriptions. Most time consuming of all was HR, which 23% of SME's spent over 60 hours a year managing. This research shows that leaders of a quarter of UK SME's lose out on nearly three hours of valuable time completing tasks which are not core to their business. Taking the UK's 5.2 million SME's into consideration, that's 624,000 hours wasted each week on non-business critical tasks.
Expense claims and general administration are the two most time consuming activities - with SMEs dedicating 28% of their time on processing claims and 27% on procuring office supplies.
Steve White, Chief Executive of BIBA commented on the research saying: "It is challenging to see that SMEs spend so much of their time on back office tasks when they could be serving their customers and generating income. This is where brokers can help. A quarter of SME leaders handle insurance - a task that falls far outside their core knowledge."
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