Free Business Checklist: 50 Things Every Small Business Needs

Davaughn White

Most small business checklists you find online are written by people who have never run a small business. They list things like "register your business name" and stop there, as if naming the LLC is the hard part. The hard part is everything that comes after. The hundred small operational decisions you have to make in year one and year two that, if you skip them, turn into expensive cleanup projects in year three.

This checklist is the version I wish someone had handed me. Fifty things, grouped into six themes. By the end of your second year in business, you should have a yes-or-no answer for each one. Not all fifty need to be done on day one. But each item should be deliberate — handled, deferred for a known reason, or actively in progress.

Work through it in order. Each section builds on the one before. And keep the list somewhere you can revisit quarterly. Most of these items are not done once and forgotten — they are systems that need maintenance.

Legal and compliance (8 items)

Get the foundation right before you spend money on anything else. Mistakes in this section are the most expensive to fix later because they involve lawyers, accountants, and the IRS.

Business entity formed. LLC, S-corp, C-corp, or sole prop — pick one deliberately. The default for most SMBs is an LLC. The decision affects taxes, liability, and your ability to take outside investment later. Talk to an accountant before you file.
EIN issued. Your federal tax ID from the IRS. Free, takes ten minutes online. Required for opening a business bank account, hiring employees, and filing taxes. Do not skip this even if you are a single-member LLC.
Operating agreement signed. Even if you are the only owner. Single-member LLCs without an operating agreement get treated like sole proprietorships in some states, which weakens your liability shield. Two- or more-owner businesses without an operating agreement are a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Business bank account opened. Separate from your personal account, in the business name, funded with a documented capital contribution. Mixing personal and business funds is the fastest way to lose corporate veil protection.
Business insurance in place. At minimum, general liability. If you have employees, workers' comp (required in most states). If you give professional advice, errors and omissions. If you have a physical location, property insurance. Talk to an independent broker, not the first one Google shows you.
State and local registrations complete. Most states require an annual report and a small filing fee. Cities and counties often require a business license. Some industries (food, construction, healthcare, real estate) require specific permits. Search your state secretary of state site plus your city's business license portal.
Employer setup if you have or plan to hire staff. Register with your state's workforce agency for unemployment insurance. Set up state withholding tax. If you have employees in multiple states, register in each one. This is paperwork-heavy and worth outsourcing to a payroll provider from day one.
Terms of service and privacy policy on your website. Even a small business website needs both. If you collect any customer data — names, emails, phone numbers — privacy laws (CCPA, GDPR if you have any EU traffic) apply. Templates are fine for early days, but have a lawyer review before you grow past a few hundred customers.

Money (8 items)

The financial foundation. Set this up wrong and you spend year three doing forensic accounting at $200 an hour. Set it up right and tax season is two emails to your accountant.

Bookkeeping system in place. QuickBooks, Xero, or a built-in finance module in your operations platform. The goal is daily-or-weekly categorization of every transaction. Not monthly. Monthly catch-ups always become quarterly catch-ups become annual nightmares.
Invoicing system live. Custom-numbered invoices, payment terms documented, late-payment policy on the invoice. Email-and-spreadsheet invoicing falls apart at 20 customers. Get a real system before then.
Payment processor integrated. Stripe, Square, or whatever fits your channel. Test the full flow: customer pays, you get the funds, your books update. Make sure refund and chargeback workflows are documented before your first dispute.
Sales tax setup complete. Know which states you have nexus in. Register in each one. Set up automated sales tax calculation (TaxJar, Avalara, or built into your billing platform). Sales tax mistakes are the single most common reason small businesses get audited.
Payroll system live if you have employees. Gusto, Rippling, ADP, or similar. Do not run payroll through spreadsheets. The penalties for late or wrong payroll tax filings are brutal, and they compound monthly.
Accountant relationship established. Not just at tax time. A real CPA you talk to quarterly about entity structure, tax planning, and major decisions. Expect to pay $1,500 to $5,000 a year for a small business. Worth every dollar.
Separate business credit card. Different account from your personal credit card. Pays expenses, builds business credit, gives you cashback or points. Run all business expenses through it. Never charge personal stuff to it.
Expense tracking workflow. Receipts captured (photo, email forwarding, or app) and matched to transactions. Reimbursements processed for any out-of-pocket spend. Mileage logged if anyone drives for work. The IRS does not accept "I think it was around $40" as documentation.

Customer and sales (8 items)

How leads turn into customers, and how customers turn into repeat business. Most small businesses run this entire layer on memory and email. That works up to about ten customers. Past that, you need systems.

CRM live. A single place where every lead, prospect, and customer lives. Contact info, deal stage, last contact date, notes from every conversation. The CRM is the spine of the sales operation. If it is in spreadsheets or in three salespeople's heads, you do not have a CRM.
Lead capture set up. Forms on your website that route to the CRM. Phone calls that get logged. Walk-ins or referrals that get entered the same day. A lead that does not make it into the CRM in the first 24 hours is a lead you will forget.
Transactional email and SMS configured. Order confirmations, appointment reminders, receipts, password resets. Even pre-revenue businesses need these. Use a dedicated transactional service (Postmark, SendGrid, Twilio) rather than your regular inbox.
Sales pipeline defined. Named stages, exit criteria for each stage, expected duration in each stage. Common pattern: New → Qualified → Proposal → Negotiation → Won/Lost. Without defined stages, every deal is "in progress" and forecasting is guessing.
Pricing document written down. Internal source of truth on what you charge, what discounts are allowed, what the floor is. When sales reps make up prices on the fly, margin erodes quietly. Document it once and revise quarterly.
Contract template ready. Standard MSA or service agreement, drafted by a lawyer, with clear scope, payment terms, IP ownership, and termination clauses. Do not negotiate every contract from scratch. Start from the template and red-line only the few clauses that matter.
Proposal template ready. Branded, structured, with clear scope, deliverables, timeline, and price. Word-document-from-scratch proposals waste hours per deal. A reusable template cuts that to minutes.
Follow-up cadence documented. What happens after a lead doesn't respond to the first outreach? Day 3 email, day 7 phone, day 14 email, day 30 close-out. Without a cadence, every salesperson invents their own (or does nothing). Half your closed deals come from follow-ups four through seven.

Operations (8 items)

How work actually gets done day to day. The internal plumbing. Easy to neglect because it is invisible to customers, but the friction it creates compounds every week.

Project tracking system live. Tasks, owners, deadlines, status. Trello, Asana, or a built-in projects module — anything is better than email threads. The minimum bar is that on any given day, anyone on the team can answer "what am I working on, what is blocking it, what is due?" without asking.
Helpdesk or support inbox. A shared queue for customer questions, with assignment, status, and response-time tracking. Personal inboxes hide tickets. Shared inboxes surface them. If you ever need to answer "how fast do we respond to customers?" you need this.
Knowledge base or internal wiki. Documented processes, policies, and answers to questions you have already answered three times. Notion, Confluence, or a built-in docs system. The test: can a new hire get to 50% productivity in week one by reading the wiki, or do they need a senior person watching them?
Document storage set up. Cloud-based (Google Drive, Dropbox, SharePoint), with a folder structure that makes sense, with access controls. Files on individual laptops are files that disappear when laptops disappear.
File backup strategy. Automatic backups of critical data — financial records, customer data, source code, design files. Cloud-based services handle a lot of this, but verify. The day you discover backups were not running is the day you lose three years of work.
Work-order or job-tracking system if applicable. Field service businesses, manufacturers, contractors, repair shops — everyone with discrete jobs needs this. Paper work orders fall through cracks. Digital ones with status, customer, materials, and assigned tech do not.
Time tracking if you bill hourly. Per-project, per-task, captured the same day. Reconstructed time at the end of the month is fiction. Use a tool integrated with your invoicing so billable hours flow directly into invoices.
Vendor list maintained. Every recurring supplier, their account number, the contact person, what you pay them, when contracts renew. The number of small businesses paying for SaaS subscriptions they forgot about is staggering.

Marketing (8 items)

How new customers find you. Marketing is the easiest place to spend money badly. The fundamentals below cost almost nothing and matter more than any paid channel.

Website live with clear positioning. Not a brochure. A page that explains what you do, who you do it for, and how to get started. Above-the-fold should answer "what is this and is it for me?" in five seconds. If your website looks like it was built in 2014, your prospects assume the business is too.
Google Business Profile claimed and complete. Free, takes an hour, drives 30-50% of inbound for local businesses. Photos, hours, services, response to every review within 48 hours. If you have a physical location, this beats most paid marketing for ROI.
Review collection process. Automated request after every transaction, sent at the right moment (after a successful job, not the day of). Google, Yelp, or industry-specific platforms depending on your business. Aim for one review per ten customers as a baseline.
SEO basics done. Title tags, meta descriptions, H1 on every page, mobile-friendly, fast-loading. You do not need a $5,000/mo SEO agency in year one. You do need a site that does not have obvious technical errors. Run it through Google Lighthouse and fix the red items.
Social presence on one or two relevant platforms. Not all of them. Pick the one or two your customers actually use and post consistently. A dead Instagram with a last-post-date of 18 months ago hurts your business more than not having an account at all.
Email marketing list growing. Even 200 engaged subscribers is a marketing channel. Capture on the website, capture at point of sale, capture from any inbound. Send something — newsletter, offers, updates — once a month minimum. Email is the only channel you own.
Content publishing cadence. Blog posts, case studies, guides, or video — pick one format and commit. Even one solid piece a month for two years gives you 24 pieces of content that compound in search. Most competitors give up after three months.
One paid channel tested. Google Search, Meta, LinkedIn, podcast sponsorship, direct mail — whatever fits the audience. Spend $500 to $2,000 over 30-60 days on one channel, measure cost-per-acquired-customer, decide whether to double down or move on. Skipping the test means you guess about paid forever.

People and internal (10 items)

The infrastructure for working with other humans. The moment you go from one person to two, all of these matter. By the time you have five employees, they are non-negotiable.

Hiring playbook written. Job description template, interview rubric, reference-check script, offer letter template. Without a playbook, hiring is vibes, and vibes hire the wrong people 40% of the time.
Onboarding document for new hires. A 30/60/90 day plan, accounts to create, training to complete, who to meet. New hires who are dropped into chaos resign within six months. New hires who get a clear first week stay.
1:1 cadence with every direct report. Weekly or bi-weekly, 30 minutes, agenda set by the report. Not status updates — career, blockers, feedback, growth. The day you stop doing 1:1s is the day you stop hearing about problems before they explode.
Performance review template. Twice a year minimum. Goals set, progress reviewed, feedback documented. Not annual surprise reviews. People should never be surprised by feedback at review time.
Compensation ranges documented. Per role, per level, internally. Not made up per offer. Compensation that gets negotiated rather than ranged creates pay disparities that turn into discrimination claims.
HR system in place once you hit 5 employees. Time off tracking, document storage, compliance training records. Email-based HR breaks immediately. Use a real HR system or a built-in HR module.
Security training completed by all staff. Phishing awareness, password hygiene, what to do if you suspect a breach. Most security incidents at small businesses come from a person clicking the wrong link, not a sophisticated attack. Training reduces that by 70%+.
MFA on every account. Email, banking, payroll, CRM, infrastructure, social — everything. Yes, it is annoying. It is also the single highest-ROI security control you can implement. The day someone phishes one of your team's passwords, MFA is the difference between an inconvenience and a disaster.
Password manager rolled out. 1Password, Bitwarden, or similar. Shared vaults for team credentials, individual vaults for personal. Sticky notes and shared spreadsheets of passwords are how breaches happen.
IT acceptable-use policy written. What employees can install, what data they can store on personal devices, what happens to company data when they leave. Without a policy, you cannot enforce. Templates are fine to start.

What to do with this list

Print it or save it. Mark each item: done, in progress, deferred, or not applicable. The honest assessment matters more than the cosmetic checkbox. "Deferred because we are a two-person shop and HR system is not needed yet" is a perfectly good answer. "I have been meaning to do payroll properly for six months" is the answer that should make you nervous.

Revisit the list quarterly. Three items will jump from deferred to in-progress every quarter as the business grows. Some items you nailed in year one need maintenance in year three — your privacy policy needs updating, your vendor list has drifted, your performance review template has not been touched since you wrote it.

The businesses that quietly fail in year three almost always have ten or fifteen items on this list that were ignored in year one. The ones that scale cleanly tend to have done forty-five of the fifty deliberately, and made conscious decisions about the other five.

Run the checklist as a real workflow, not a one-off

A checklist as a static document is a dead document. A checklist as a tracked workflow — with each item owned, deadlines set, status visible — is the difference between intent and execution.

Want this checklist as a runnable system inside your business? Deelo turns each line item into a tracked task in [Deelo Projects](/apps/projects), wires your sales motion through [Deelo CRM](/apps/crm), runs invoicing through [Deelo Invoicing](/apps/invoicing), handles support tickets via [Deelo Helpdesk](/apps/helpdesk), and consolidates HR records in [Deelo HR](/apps/hr) — all in one platform on one bill. Most small businesses we work with come from a stack of 10+ separate SaaS subscriptions and end up paying less for more capability. See [Deelo pricing](/pricing) for the full breakdown, or read more on [the true cost of software sprawl](/blog/true-cost-software-sprawl-saas-tools).

Small business essentials FAQ

Do I need to complete all 50 items before launching?: No. The minimum to legally operate and collect money is roughly 12-15 items: business structure registered, EIN obtained, business bank account opened, primary insurance in place, payment processor set up, basic accounting workflow, and customer agreement template. The other 35 items improve operations, marketing, and resilience but aren't blockers to first revenue. The mistake new operators make is treating the entire checklist as launch-blocking — you'll spend 6 months on setup instead of getting feedback from real customers. Launch fast on the legal essentials, build the rest while operating.
Which items am I most likely to skip and regret?: Three repeat offenders. First, formal customer agreements — operators handshake deals for years, then face a payment dispute with no enforceable terms. Second, separate business bank account — commingling personal and business funds creates tax and liability headaches that take years to untangle. Third, basic data backup — businesses lose customer data to ransomware, accidental deletion, or vendor outages. The pattern: each feels optional for months, then becomes critical in a single bad incident. Knock these three out before you celebrate revenue milestones.
What's the right insurance package for a typical small business?: General liability and professional liability cover most service-based SMBs. General liability handles slip-and-fall and property damage. Professional liability (sometimes called E&O) handles claims that your professional services caused harm. Add commercial auto if you operate vehicles, workers comp if you have employees, and cyber liability if you store customer data. Total annual premium for a 1-10 person business typically runs 800-3,000 dollars depending on vertical. Don't skip — a single claim without insurance often closes the business.
How often should I revisit this checklist?: Annually, at minimum, plus after any major business change. Items expire or need updating: insurance policies renew (verify coverage still matches operations), passwords age out (rotate quarterly), business plans evolve (revisit the customer agreement template), tax filings deadline (calendar reminders), and tools change (the stack you built in year one may be wrong in year three). The annual review takes 2-3 hours. Most issues are minor (update a phone number, rotate a key). The occasional issue (expired license, lapsed insurance) is exactly what the review is meant to catch.

Run your business on Deelo

Deelo's 59-app platform covers most of this checklist — CRM, invoicing, automation, customer agreements, and more in one place. Start free, no credit card required.

Start Free — No Credit Card

Related pages

Explore More

All software categories Compare alternatives Best software by industry