Small Business Operations Checklist: 25 Processes Every Business Needs

Your Business Runs on Processes (Even If They’re Not Written Down)

Every business has processes. The question is whether they’re in someone’s head or written down where anyone can follow them.

When processes live in someone’s head, you get inconsistency, bottlenecks, and the constant risk that your best employee walks out the door and takes your operations with them.

When processes are documented, you get a business that runs whether you’re there or not. Here’s the checklist.

The 25 Processes Checklist

Daily Operations

1. Opening procedures Who opens? What needs to happen before the doors open or the first customer arrives? Document every step from walking in the door to being ready for business.

2. Closing procedures Same as opening, but in reverse. Cash reconciliation, cleaning, security, lockup. The most common place for inconsistency.

3. Customer/client intake What happens when a new customer walks in, calls, or fills out a form? How do you capture their information? What’s the first response?

4. Order fulfillment / service delivery The core of what you do. How does a product go from order to delivery? How does a service get scheduled and completed?

5. Daily cash handling / reconciliation How is cash counted? When? By whom? What happens when it doesn’t match?

Employee Management

6. Hiring and interviewing How do you post a job, screen applicants, conduct interviews, and make offers? See our guide on creating SOPs for your business for structuring these.

7. New employee onboarding First-day experience, paperwork, training schedule, introductions. The single most important process for reducing turnover. See our complete onboarding checklist.

8. Employee training How do new hires learn their job? What materials do they receive? Who trains them? How do you verify they’re ready? Check out our guide on building a training plan.

9. Scheduling How are shifts assigned? How far in advance? How do swaps work? What happens when someone calls out?

10. Performance reviews How often? What format? Who conducts them? What’s discussed? Where are they documented?

11. Termination / offboarding How do you handle voluntary departures? Involuntary? What needs to happen with access, keys, equipment, and final pay?

Financial Operations

12. Invoicing When are invoices sent? What system? What terms? What happens when one is late?

13. Accounts payable How do you process incoming bills? Who approves payments? When are they paid?

14. Payroll How are hours collected? When is payroll run? How are errors handled? What about taxes?

15. Expense reporting and reimbursement How do employees submit expenses? What’s the approval process? What’s the turnaround time?

Customer Service

16. Complaint handling How do you receive, log, and resolve customer complaints? What’s the escalation path? What’s the response time target?

17. Returns and refunds What’s your policy? How is it processed? Who has authority to approve exceptions?

18. Follow-up and feedback collection Do you follow up after a sale or service? How do you collect reviews? What do you do with the feedback?

Marketing and Sales

19. Lead follow-up When a potential customer reaches out, what happens? How fast? Who responds? What do they say?

20. Social media posting What platforms? How often? Who creates content? Who approves it? See our SOP examples for a social media approval process.

21. Email marketing How often do you email your list? Who writes the emails? What are the approval steps?

IT and Security

22. Account setup / access provisioning When a new employee starts, what accounts need to be created? What permissions do they get?

23. Data backup How often is your data backed up? Where? Has anyone tested restoring from a backup?

24. Password and access management How are passwords managed? What happens when an employee leaves? How often are they rotated?

Compliance and Safety

25. Workplace safety and incident reporting What are your safety procedures? How are incidents reported and documented? Where are the first aid supplies?

For staffing agencies and regulated industries, see our compliance checklist.

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How to Use This Checklist

Don’t try to document all 25 at once. That’s a recipe for burnout and a pile of half-finished documents nobody uses.

Priority System

Document first (this week):

• The processes only one person knows how to do
• The processes where mistakes are most costly
• The processes new hires need most urgently

Document next (this month):

• Processes that happen daily
• Processes that affect customer experience
• Processes involved in getting paid

Document later (this quarter):

• Monthly/quarterly processes
• Processes that rarely change
• Nice-to-have documentation

The One-Page Test

Each process document should ideally fit on one page (or one screen). If it’s longer than that, you’re probably combining multiple processes into one. Split them up.

For the structure of each document, follow our guide on how to write a business process document.

Scoring Your Business

Go through the checklist above and mark each process:

• Green: Documented, accessible, and up to date
• Yellow: Exists somewhere but outdated or hard to find
• Red: Not documented — lives in someone’s head

If most of your processes are red, you’re running on memory. That works until it doesn’t — and it usually stops working when you’re trying to grow, when a key employee leaves, or when you need to train multiple people at once.

The Payoff

Businesses that document their processes can:

• Train new hires in days instead of weeks. Hand them the documentation and let them learn.
• Delegate without micromanaging. When the process is written down, you don’t need to oversee every step.
• Maintain quality when you’re not there. Vacations, sick days, and growth all require the business to run without you.
• Scale beyond yourself. You can’t grow if every process requires your personal involvement.

Get Started

Pick one process from this checklist — the one that causes you the most headaches — and write it down. Step by step. Share it with your team. See how it changes things.

What’s the Process For makes this simple. Create step-by-step guides your team can access from any device. Searchable, always current, no training needed to use it. Start free.

Related reading:

• How to Create SOPs for Your Business
• Standard Operating Procedure Examples
• How to Write a Business Process Document