By Victoria Schmid

For seasonal enterprises, summer can be good for business. Anything associated with tourism or warm-weather activities can experience more foot traffic and significant increases in daily sales. For other types of small business, the summer season can present specific challenges and opportunities. Whether summer’s usually a boom or a bust for your bottom line, follow these simple steps to tidy up your space, your staffing, and your finances.

-Staff up

Summer is a popular time to take a little rest and relaxation, so ask your employees to put in their personal time off requests well in advance. A little notice gives you the chance to fill holes in the schedule and ensure you’re staffed appropriately. Advanced warning of extended vacations also allows you to coordinate with payroll and delay deadlines or business events.

Some small businesses, like landscaping services or restaurants geared toward tourists, may need to staff up to accommodate seasonal surges. You’ll also want to have a hiring plan in place for late summer if you have younger employees who need to shuffle schedules around to accommodate school commitments in the fall.

-Complete a digital audit

While it sounds intimidating, a digital audit lets you weed through your files, back up your computers, and conduct a bit of virtual maintenance. If you have a website, assess performance, clean up and refresh your social media channels, and check in on your marketing strategy to ensure it’s been effective. If you want to adjust your advertising to increase visibility and—hopefully—profit, now is the time. Realigning your strategic small business goals during the summer means they’ll have a chance to affect your bottom line before the end of the fiscal year.

–Get your finances in order

A line-by-line audit of your expenses and deductions shouldn’t wait until the last minute before your federal taxes are due. Avoid the scramble and do a midyear self-audit of your current overhead costs, scanning for frivolous or unnecessary items that could be eliminated or adjusted. Cancel unused subscriptions, consider dialing back phone service, and assess your internet speed to see if you’re paying for more than you need. Look hard at both monthly reoccurring costs and more-expensive items to brainstorm where you might be able to trim costs to increase profit margins for your small business.

-Clean your space

The gorgeous weather outside can inspire you to throw open the windows and let the sunlight expose the dusty cobwebs and grimy corners that have been hiding all winter. If you have a storefront, summer is a perfect time to invest a little elbow grease in tidying up the space, cleaning and rearranging window displays, and brightening up curb appeal for passing potential customers. It’s also worth giving those backrooms, storage spaces, and offices a good once over by refreshing threadbare furniture, taming cord creep, and shifting seasonal inventory so it’s more accessible when you need it.

-Keep up on building maintenance

You can wait until next year to get that AC serviced, but do you really want to risk having an expensive breakdown? It’s much more cost effective to keep up with routine building maintenance and yearly tune-ups for HVAC and other systems than risk the extra fees from emergency failures and outages. It’s not just air conditioning you should keep an eye on during the hotter summer season—it’s also necessities like clean, filtered drinking water for employees and proper insulation to keep down your cooling and heating costs.

Using the summer months to get your small business firing on all cylinders is a fantastic way to celebrate the season. Follow these tips to keep your profit margins healthy and refresh your virtual and physical business space fit before the fiscal year draws to a close.

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Victoria Schmid enjoys writing about technology for the “everyday” person. She is a specialist in consumer technology and internet culture. She has a background in broadcast journalism.