How to Use Software to Organize SOPs & Business Documentation (Beginner SmartSuite Tutorial)

Your business has a lot of information floating around in it. Whether it's how you answer the phone, how you write quotes, how you bookkeep. All of these things right now, if we're not careful, are being stored inside human brains. If there's one thing we know about human brains, it's that they don't always work the way we want them to. And memories can fade and thoughts can be lost and that word on the tip of your tongue just goes away. And, and when it comes to something as important as the business or the team we are trying to build, that is not the safest place to store that important information. That's why any leader, any business manager, any committed employee should be pushing their business to create a centralized documentation area. A little place, a little storage area for all the essential information your business needs to know to continue to, to exist next year and next decade and next century. Right? Because we don't want to get hit by a bus and lose 20% of our business knowledge. So how do we do that? That's why in this video we're going to be using a piece of software called SmartSuite to build out a HQ for our business. A hub for all of the knowledge that would otherwise be stored in our head. So it's safe regardless of what happens to the people or the noggins that are running our business today. Now, before we dive in, quick reminder that this is gonna be a click by click tutorial. This is gonna go through a lot of detail. I strongly encourage you, if you were an adult, I assume you are watching this video to do what works best for adult brains and use that affiliate link to click along with me. Learn by doing. Don't just consume this video and expect your brain to remember it. It probably won't unless you actually follow along. So the affiliate link for SmartSuite is below this video. And I also wanna say a quick thank you, thank you to SmartSuite for sponsoring this video so we can provide this content to you guys for free. Ready to get started? So if You've got your SmartSuite open, I want you to open into the homepage, the main area and follow along with me here. So here we are inside SmartSuite and what we are going to start off with is adding a solution. Now normally if we were to create a new area, a new solution in SmartSuite I would have you start off with the templates area. Because unlike most other softwares out there, the templates are built into SmartSuite are pretty thoughtfully created and actually Pretty helpful, which is rarer than you might think. But because this concept isn't one that's available in their template vault yet, we're actually going to start from scratch together here. So when you start from scratch, you're going to see this page pop up, which is your new blank solution. To get us started. We're going to call this our documentation area. So we're just going to call the whole solution documentation. You can choose to pick a fun color and a fun icon, depending on your preferences. Let's see if we have a brain in here. There we go. Okay, that brain's way more fun. There we go. So pick your color and your icon, but really just need this blank solution in order to get started. Now, we have a lot more things that we could adjust here, especially the guide, which is great for documenting the documentation, but we're going to skip those for now. Once we've got that down, we've got one blank app. An app in SmartSuite is kind of like our database. It's a collection of information, which is called a record. So collection of record is in an app, which is all in a solution for this very first app. What we're going to do is call it sop. If you're not familiar with an sop, it is a standard operating procedure or like a recipe. Now, I have a full definition up here, so if you're stuck on this term, check out that video and then pop on back when you're ready. What we're going to do in this SOP area is to create a database of how to's for our business, our playbooks, how do we answer the phone, how do we write invoices, how do we whatever. These SOPs are going to be focused on specific actions we need to do. And because SOPs can be at all sorts of scales, I want to limit our conversation by focusing on just SOPs that are simple, basic, and less than eight scale steps. Okay, so if you've got a giant SOP, like how to make a marketing strategy, and it's 80 steps, that's not what we're going to focus on today. We're going to focus on the little things first. All right, so we have our SOP area. The next thing I want us to do is to give our view a name. Our view is this thing over in the top left corner, which shows us how we are seeing our information. Just for quick context, here you can see information inside of SmartSuite in many different ways. And really, these views are kind of like layouts but the very first view we're going to call here is we're going to rename it using the three dots and we're going to call this all sopsby Department. Okay, all sops by department. Nothing crazy there. So just rename that. Then we're going to exit on out and then we're going to actually start building our SOPs by department. Now personally I find it easier to create something in SmartSuite if I have some example data in there. SmartSuite's templates give us that already, which is why I find them pretty helpful. But for now we're just going to create a few blank ones for ourselves so we have some examples to mess around with. The first SOP I'd like you to write in here is how to make toast. Now this is always my example and the reason I like it as an example is because it's kind of ridiculous and you would never have an SOP that's called this. So we're going to make how to make toast and then how to butter toast. There we go. We've got two different SOPs here. Hopefully you're not a toast factory of some kind. So these will be clearly example data and not too confusing. Once we have these two titles in here, let's start messing with our data structure. If I go inside these, you'll see we've got a bunch of information just pre baked in here and I'm not sure is that helpful to us. So let's first delete the stuff that we are sure we do not need. For example, I really don't want a priority field on my SOPs. All my SOPs are equally important. Priority is not that helpful. I also don't want a due date field at this point because I don't think I'm going to need to have due dates for these SOPs. I might change that in the future, but for now I'm going to get rid of it. Now the assigned to and status fields I think I am going to keep, but I want to change them around a little bit because assigning doesn't really make sense for an instruction document. Imagine you had a recipe for pancakes. Would you have an assignee for that recipe for pancakes? No, but you might have an owner or an expert, someone who wrote the recipe. So in this case I'm going to call this the owner. And actually let's make it more clear, SOP owner. This is going to be the person who is the owner of the sop. The person who is ultimately in charge of making sure this SOP is beautiful. Below this, I have the option in SmartSuite to have this SOP show up in my work. Now, this might take a little aside, but let me explain what that means. My work is this section up in the top of SmartSuite where it shows you kind of your task list. The option I just showed you was asking me, hey, do you want this SOP to show up in someone's assignments if it needs action? To me, I would say, yeah, let's make sure it does. Because even though SOPs are not tasks, SOPs are something we want to have updated. And if something is not up to date, I want people to be reminded to update that sop. So I'm going to go ahead and leave that in there and keep it displayed in my work. Now, to the right of SOP Owner, I have my status column. This is where I can say, hey, what's the condition of the sop? But currently the status column seems like it's more built for tasks, so I'm going to want to do some editing again, just like the other one. I'm going to click on this little carrot and I'm going to modify the field settings to make it more appropriate for what I'm doing. So here I'm going to call this SOP condition, and I'm going to change these values to something that makes more sense for a condition field. In this case, I'm going to go with not started in process, needs revisions, and perfect. And I think I'm going to change the colors here too, just to make sure that they stand out a little bit more. Not fan of the bright, bright neon colors here. So there we go. Actually in process. Let's make that yellow. Okay, so now I have a condition field that shows me all of my statuses. I can choose to have a default value for this column if I wanted to. So whenever a new SOP is created, what would I want this to be? I'm going to have it default to not started just as it's set up here. So now I have an SOP owner, which could be someone like me, and an SOP condition, which is how quality is our making toast sop. And these two columns are looking pretty good at this point. But over to the left, I've got one more I want to edit. That's the title now. Yes, it's kind of clear based on context that this is the title of the sop, but I believe clarity is kind. So let's add a little bit more detail here. SOP title is what we're going to rename this to be. So we're always clear if we look at this field in other reports what title we're referring to. I'm going to make this be a manual input instead of just an auto generated number, so that way we can type it in each time. I'm also going to require entries to be unique and I'm not going to require an entry to the field. This is because I want to make sure that if we want to fill things in in the opposite order, it's going to be all right. So there we go. We created our SOP title. Now we're still missing a very important piece of this SOP journey, which is a place to write the actual SOPs. Now we have additional fields that we could choose to display that are kind of hidden in the background. But to organize all of these and to make sure that we have the fields that we need to have in order to actually write the sop, I'm going to go inside the record itself and customize some things. So if I scroll around this area, you can see many of the familiar fields we just saw. Back in the columns area, we've got SOP Condition, which I'm going to drag up to the top. We've got the SOP owner, which I'm also going to drag to the top and all that's nice, but we still need some fields to actually write the SOP in. So we do have this default description field here and I think this is going to be a good candidate for repurposing to modify it into being the SOP description. So I'm going to call this center area here procedure. This is going to be where I write the steps of the process using the Smart Doc field type. Smartdoc is smartsuites a lot of smarts there. It's their built in document editor gives you more formatting options than you would in just a normal text field. And considering we want this to look a little stylish, this that feels appropriate to me. So we're going to go ahead and update entry and call this the procedure here. We can use all the formatting options built into this area, including tables, table of contents and so on, and have step one, step two and so on to write out our procedure. One thing I like about SmartSuite, if you haven't noticed here, is that everything by default is toggleable, collapsible. And I don't know, I'm like a team toggle, not the software toggle. But you know what I mean, this, this kind of collapsing option, I love how clean that looks. And so I have the space to write anything I want, including images, other things, and add all of these in to this smart document area. This is going to be my base procedure. Now, so far we have created a basic SOP layout. We've got spot for our procedure, we've got spot for our owner status, all that kind of good stuff. But I want to add one more field here and that is the field for one what department an SOP belongs into. I don't need this by any means, but I like having it so I can categorize my SOPs into buckets that make them easier to review and digest for someone new on the team. So in this case I'm going to choose Multi select because I do think some sops might fall under multiple departments. I'm going to call this Departments. You could also call it Categories, whatever you want. Now, once I have these choices added, I can change the colors if I so choose, change how they visually appear. If I want a certain layout, we're going to go with the Color dot option. I can set that default value if I want to, so maybe I'll default everything to Ops. If I don't know, I can choose to have it be a dropdown or a checkbox, whichever I prefer. I'm going to go with checkbox and then I'm going to remove the ability for folks to create new choices because I'm not going to be creating new business departments willy nilly. Once I add the field, it's going to show up inside my task itself as checkboxes, just like I requested. So I'm going to go inside fields to display and choose departments to add it to the visible selected fields here. Once I do, you see that little colored pill icon here which lets me know which departments I selected in the other view, If I don't feel like opening tasks and adding details here, I can also just click on this little cell and add the information without even going inside the SOP itself. Now we have departments here, but remember I called this whole view, this whole area, all SOPs by department. That by suggests that we might have things broken out in some way. So I think what I'm going to do now is group by the department that I chose earlier. So here we can see we've now grouped the items by the department. Now do you notice what happens in SmartSuite when you have multiple select options chosen? How to make Toast shows up in both categories. Personally, I Love that. I wish more tools would handle multi select that way. But just something to be aware of if you want to be counting up each sop. But I can then collapse each of these areas and I've got a nice concise SOP directory for tracking information about how my business works. If I want to organize this in other layouts, I can choose to do so, such as these here where I can have them as cards. Hell, if you wanted a map view for some reason, you could do that. But this is kind of the structure we need to start building out that second brain. Now of course, once you have that structure, you actually need to start filling this in in. So inside these tasks here, I would strongly suggest you input your SOP template, your fill in the blank structure for how you like your sops to be written. If you don't have one, we have a free one that we talk about in this video up here. And you're going to want to start making sure you have a record for each SOP you need, right? So if you need to create a record for how to answer the phone, write that in here, even if it's blank blanket first add the SOP here so it's there and available for you to start filling in. This is how we can start taking the knowledge from our brain and putting it into a tool. Because now my new employee could see this information. They don't have to learn how to answer the phone the hard way or ask me and wait till I answer. They can find that information all in one place. And of course, SOPs are not the only form of documentation that we have available to us. Some things in your noggin aren't a how to. Some of them are just websites you like to visit or content that you like to read, consume to learn about the industry. That's why it's great that we can create multiple apps inside of SmartSuite, all inside this documentation area, all with different formatting. So maybe you want to create a market research area to track all of the articles that you like to read or the publishers you like to follow. Maybe you want to have a wikis area where you can put information around general topics that you just want to dump knowledge into that doesn't relate to a particular process. You can add as many sections as you'd like here, whatever it takes to get your brain out of your brain and into a shared entity that other people can see, learn from and contribute to. This is how we can build a documentation hub for our business that lives on long past any one particular employee, founder, owner, whatever. We could also build alternate views to show things by style status. So your operations manager could monitor the condition of your SOPs. We could build a chart or a dashboard that shows us, hey, what's the condition of our SOPs? How many do we have? We've talked about some of that in some other software up here. With this we can start to gamify the process of documenting our business and really make it a fun process of not relying so much on our own stress, our own memory, and our own personal brain storage. Okay, so this is how you can build a documentation hub for your business inside of SmartSuite. All you need to do is create the solution, create the app, build out those cells that you want to have and put in your SOP template. And then wash, rinse and repeat for every SOP that you need to document or anything beyond SOPs that you need to document. If you have any questions about this or want to dig deeper, check out the links in the description or just drop me a comment below while you're down there. Please do like and subscribe. It costs you nothing and it really helps this video reach more people. Thanks so much for watching and than SmartSuite for sponsoring this video. Until next time guys. Enjoy the process.