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Google Forms is just one tool in a business owner’s toolkit that can help save time and money. It’s easy to use even if you have limited technical skills, and it can be leveraged to streamline and automate a wide variety of tasks. You can accomplish everything from collecting payments to organizing employee requests, reducing manual tasks, and more.
Following are five practical ways entrepreneurs and business leaders can integrate Google Forms into daily operations.
1. Online Sales, Order Forms, and Event Registrations
Selling online doesn’t mean you need to invest in an expensive ecommerce platform that comes with monthly fees, complex setups, and ongoing maintenance. Instead, small businesses and service providers can quickly start selling online using Google Forms and a payment add-on.
For example, the Google Forms Payment Add-On from Payable lets you turn a Google Form into a simple checkout experience. It doesn’t require any coding knowledge, and it’s both easy to learn and fast to set up with no startup costs. There are just four key steps to get started:
- Create a Google Form where customers can select the products or services they want to purchase.
- Add pricing fields.
- Connect the form to a payment processor using the Payable add-on.
- Share the link to the form with customers or add it to your website.
Once you set it up, all orders and payments will be centralized in a Google Sheets spreadsheet that’s easy to track and manage.
2. PTO Requests
Tracking paid time off (PTO) requests through emails, texts, or handwritten notes is confusing and time-consuming. As your team grows, the process can become problematic, but a Google Form can be the perfect solution.
When you allow your employees to request time off using a PTO request form, both you and your staff can use a single, consistent process. Employees can quickly and easily submit requests, and you get a structured, searchable record of all time-off data saved in a Google Sheet.
Include the following fields in the form, so you can later search, sort, and filter the data in the spreadsheet by employee, date, and type. That way, no one loses track of used and available time off.
- Employee name
- Department or role
- PTO start and end dates
- Type of leave (vacation, sick, personal, etc.)
- Additional notes
To automate the process, set up automatic email notifications when an employee requests time off. You can also automatically share approves or denials with employees. It’s a simple process that significantly reduces errors.
3. Expense Reimbursements
How much time do you and your employees waste on expense reports every month? You can streamline the entire process, improve accuracy, and reduce back-and-forth with employees using a Google Form.
This is also a great way to standardize the process, which will mitigate the problems that happen when employees forget receipts, submit inconsistent information, or turn in their expense reports late.
Set up a Google Form with the following information at a minimum to speed up expense report submission and management:
- Employee name
- Date of expense
- Vendor or merchant
- Expense category (travel, meals, supplies, etc.)
- Amount
- Description
- Upload field for receipt images or PDFs
Every form submission should populate a Google Sheet where you can track spending by employee or category, manage reimbursements, and reconcile expense payments with your accounting software.
4. Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is valuable, but there has to be a quick way for customers to provide feedback. If it’s even slightly challenging for a customer to provide feedback, they won’t do it. As a small business owner, you also need a way to analyze the feedback customers provide, or collecting it is a waste of time. Google Forms can make it easy to gather feedback and turn it into meaningful information you can actually use to improve your business.
Google Forms are very versatile, so don’t be afraid to think outside the box. Here are just a small number of ways you can use them in your business:
- Post-purchase surveys
- Event or workshop evaluations
- Customer service experiences
- New product ideas
- Product or service improvement ideas
Of course, you can create numerous Google Forms to accept customer feedback, but customers need to know how to access those forms in order to submit their information and opinions. Share links to your feedback forms in your email messages, in social media posts, on receipts, on your website, and more. Consider creating QR codes to offer another easy way for customers to access your feedback forms.
Make sure the data collected in your feedback forms is captured automatically in a Google Sheet, so you can track it. Connecting a Google Sheet to your form is quick and easy to set up.
5. Daily Operations
Which daily business operations take up a lot of your time with repetitive manual tasks? Many of them could be perfect for automation with Google Forms.
For example, you can create a daily task form where employees can log finished work. Production or fulfillment checklists can be turned into Google Forms to confirm when orders or projects are completed. Tracking daily wins, challenges, and next steps is easy with a Google Form.
Client onboarding and new hire onboarding are also easier with forms. At any moment, you can see exactly where each client or employee is in the onboarding process. The same applies to project management.
When you track tasks and milestones with a Google Form, you can identify bottlenecks, hold employees accountable, and ensure deadlines are met. You can even reduce check-ins and meetings because the entire process can be tracked in a Google Sheet.
Key Takeaways about Google Forms for Small Businesses
Technology and automation don’t have to be expensive or complicated. Google Forms is a perfect example of a no-cost/low-cost solution that can be used in a wide variety of ways to improve small business operations.
All kinds of entrepreneurs and business leaders, including consultants, personal trainers, clothing brands, creatives, coaches and more, use Google Forms with add-ons. Whether you’re testing a new business idea, validating demand for a new product or enhancement, or running an ecommerce venture, Google Forms gives you a flexible, low-risk way to streamline operations and grow.
