Planning guide
Choosing a digital planner for running a small business
By Print Magic StudioX ·
Running a business on your own, or around a job, means the plan lives in your head unless it lives somewhere else. A digital planner is a good somewhere else: one file on your tablet with the year dated, your week laid out, and a tab for each part of the business. It is worth being clear about what it is, though, before choosing one.
What a planner is, and what it is not
A digital planner is a PDF you write in by hand. That makes it fast and private, and good for thinking, but it does not add up figures, send reminders to your team or sync with anyone else. If several people need to see and change the same plan, a shared tool or spreadsheet is the right place for that; the planner is for your own week and your own decisions.
What a business planner should hold
- 1The dated year, month and week, so deadlines, launches and tax dates have a place to land.
- 2One home for each part of the business: ideas, products, marketing, sales, money, each a tab away.
- 3The money side: what came in, what went out, fees and what to set aside for tax.
- 4A review, weekly and monthly, so the plan changes when the numbers do.
Which planner fits
- A small business or side hustle: Side Hustle HQ, 61 templates in eight tabs, Dashboard, Ideas, Launch, Products, Marketing, Sales, Money and Review, built around a business you run beside a job.
- A busy working week: The Complete Productivity Planner, 195 templates in nine tabs, from projects, tasks and focus to work planning and reviews, with 26 productivity methods.
- Content and social media: Creator Studio, 60 templates for planning what you post.
- Savings, debt and net worth: Money Map, 62 templates, or The Complete Budget Planner for a budget and review every month.
Each is dated for the year you choose, landscape or portrait, in fourteen languages, and the same order builds next year's edition.
Start with the week
Whatever you choose, the habit that pays is the same: a weekly review on the same day each week, looking at what happened and setting next week's three priorities. Everything else in a planner hangs off that.
Keeping track of money
A planner records money by hand, which is often enough for a small business and keeps you looking at it. Zero-based, 50/30/20 or payday explains three ways to plan it, and they work for a business's own money as well as a household's.
Quick answers
Can my team use the same digital planner?
Not as a shared document: it is a PDF that each person writes in on their own device. For plans several people edit, use a shared tool and keep the planner for your own week.
Does a digital planner calculate profit or tax?
No. It holds the figures you write in: income, expenses, fees and what you set aside. The adding up is yours.
Which app should I write it in?
GoodNotes or Notability on an iPad, or any app that writes on PDFs on Android or Windows. See the best annotation apps for a digital planner.
More planning guides
- GuideHow digital planner hyperlinks work, and how to tap them in GoodNotesWhy a tap sometimes writes instead of jumping, and the one setting that fixes it.
- GuideHow to use Apple Calendar and Google Calendar with a digital plannerA PDF cannot sync, but it can hand off: Reminders, Google Calendar and Shortcuts from the page.
- GuideMonday or Sunday start planner: which week should you choose?What actually changes on the page, and a simple way to decide.
New to digital planning? Start with the planner guide: importing into GoodNotes, the Read Only trick and copying pages.