Running a business alone means wearing every hat, and the finance hat is often the heaviest. On this episode of The Life First Solopreneur, hosts Carly Ries and Joe Rando talk with Faye Pang of FreshBooks about how automation and AI are changing cash flow management, time savings, and the future of one-person businesses.
Faye has spent more than a decade helping small business owners adopt technology. She’s also the daughter of immigrant parents who ran a small wholesale meat distribution business in Canada for 23 years, so she knows the reality of small business ownership firsthand.
According to FreshBooks research, business owners who spend five or more hours a month on invoicing are nearly three times more likely to face cash flow problems (28% compared with an average of 10%). Five hours is roughly one afternoon a month, and that inefficiency adds up.
Faye recommends automating recurring invoices, offering online payment options so clients can pay faster, using reporting tools to forecast cash flow, and having access to capital in case a crunch is coming. Joe shared that rigorous invoicing and cash flow tracking helped his last company grow to millions in revenue without any outside investment.
Start with admin. Invoicing, chasing payments, filing receipts, and reconciling accounts are predictable and repeatable, and they add little customer value. Faye calls admin the handbrake on cash flow. FreshBooks data shows 41% of business owners aren’t even using online payment tools, which means many solopreneurs have an easy opportunity to win back hours.
Yes, with caveats. In a FreshBooks survey of solopreneurs and micro business owners
Joe noted that many solopreneurs aren’t getting the time savings they expected because they still need to review and correct AI output. Faye connects this to the Gartner hype cycle. After the peak of inflated expectations comes the trough of disillusionment, a natural part of adopting any new technology. Her advice is to keep experimenting, because the tools improve constantly.
Faye compares AI to hiring an intern who knows nothing about your business. If you hand them a task with no background, you get a poor result. AI works the same way. The more context and guidance you provide, the better the output. Garbage in, garbage out.
First, know that nearly everyone feels behind. Despite what social media suggests, few people have truly figured it out. Faye’s advice is to dream big and start small. Choose one repeatable task, like email follow-ups, proposal formatting, or a weekly social media calendar, and get good at it before expanding. Currently, 56% of solopreneurs use AI for marketing and design and 51% for customer service, while back-office uses remain a big untapped opportunity.
Faye believes so. Non-employing businesses are growing faster than employing ones, and 86% of solopreneurs turn to AI before hiring a person when they hit a wall. That doesn’t mean they’ll never hire. It means they can reach product-market fit with less risk and less capital. Faye expects to see many more successful one-person companies over the next five to ten years.
The client relationship. Faye suggests happily automating invoicing, follow-ups, payments, and receipt filing, while protecting the human interactions that take service from good to great.
When FreshBooks asked solopreneurs what they’d do with five extra hours a week
As Joe put it, solopreneurs are not couch people. Faye’s life-first advice is to treat time as your most valuable resource and be protective of how you spend it.
Find Faye Pang on LinkedIn and learn more about FreshBooks.