Document your processes with Loom

I’ve heard from too many nonprofits the past few months who lost a key administrator on short notice due to the Great Resignation. 

Sadly – most of the nonprofits had little to no documentation of their key financial and HR processes like:

• How to run payroll

• How to pay the bills

• How to enroll a new hire in benefits

• How to do the calculations for grant reimbursement

This makes the sudden vacancy even more painful and difficult for remaining staff because they must figure out, from scratch, how to keep the lights on.  This can quickly cost the organization thousands of dollars in lost productivity and contribute to additional burnout.  Even if the organization hires a skilled interim administrator to cover the gap, that administrator will easily spend dozens of extra hours figuring things out.

You can reduce the impact of the Great Resignation by creating basic documentation.  Loom, one of my favorite apps, turns what was a tedious and painful chore into a quick and easy experience.

Old school documentation

Until recently, documenting even basic administrative processes could mean hours of writing and screenshots.  Writing down everything can easily take hundreds of hours; even more when you include processes that don’t happen every month like payroll for someone on unpaid leave, how to handle a rehire, issuing a refund, or the like.

When you recall that most nonprofit administrative staff already work long hours just to cover their basic duties, you understand why so many important details get minimal documentation at best.

Resignation time is too late

By the time someone resigns they usually have one foot out the door.  If they already have a full routine to cover before their last day (payroll, bills, plus the exit process), that doesn’t leave enough time to create new documentation (at least the old way).
 

What is Loom?

Loom was created as a video messaging tool.  It will record your voice and your computer screen simultaneously, then automatically turn that into a unique, private webpage (URL) that you can share.

Imagine something like Zoom screen sharing but for just one person.  It records your screen and your voice at the same time.  When you're done, you hit stop and it automatically sends the video up to the cloud.  Loom generates a unique URL for your video in about 3 seconds.

Documenting with Loom

No more screen shots.  No more typing out long processes. 

You just do the routine process at a time you’re going to do it anyway and start recording.  Narrate while you do the process.  Hit stop when you’re done.

Instead of a 50-100 page process manual, you can build just a few pages of simple bullet points like this:

Payroll

• Standard payroll.  Click here.

• Payroll with maternity/paternity/adoption leave.  Click here.

• New employee payroll set up.  Click here.

• Employee last paycheck processing.  Click here.

Monthly reconciliation

• Accessing bank statements.  Click here.

• Accessing credit card statements.  Click here.

• Saving statements on the shared drive.  Click here.

• Reconciliation process in QuickBooks Online.  Click here.
  
  

So even if someone has just given you two-week’s notice, they can still get some documentation done if they use Loom.  When that employee runs payroll and does other processes that one last time, they can just run Loom while they do it.

Want to see how it works?

Here’s a video of me using Loom to document a process.

What does just the Loom video by itself look like?  Click here. 

You can’t beat the price
It’s free! 

You will pay nothing for a starter Loom account.  That gets you up to 25 videos of to up to 5 minutes each.  That’s plenty to test drive it and even to document your most critical processes.

For $96 you can get unlimited recordings for the whole year.  The upgrade pays for itself once you start using Loom for other purposes (like showing the IT manager the problem you’re having accessing a system or to train new hires how to access their pay stubs online).

 
Signing up 
Check it out here!

December 2023 Update: Zoom Clips

Zoom has recently added a new feature, Clips, that works very much like Loom. I’ve played around with it for a couple of weeks and so far it looks like a good alternative.