9 Best SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) Templates for Businesses

Standard operating procedures (SOPs) provide documented step-by-step instructions for consistent and reliable execution of critical company processes and activities. Well-designed SOPs significantly improve productivity, compliance, onboarding, quality control and day-to-day operations management across departments.

Industry surveys indicate implementing formal SOPs delivers:

  • 69% faster onboarding for new employees
  • 72% increased productivity through process consistency
  • 83% better compliance via standardized protocols
  • 58% higher customer satisfaction through quality control

However, only 32% of small businesses and 54% of medium businesses have formal SOPs in place. Common deterrents include lack of specialized expertise and the significant time investments required for creating effective procedures documentation from scratch.

This is where customizable SOP templates bridge the gap – providing businesses high quality pre-built procedures frameworks for every major function. The rest of this guide provides an indepth look at 9 top sources for excellent, professionally designed and easily adaptable SOP templates across key business disciplines.

Guide Sections

Why SOP Templates Provide Value

Template Provider Deep Dives

Daily Tasks SOP Checklists

Recommendations by Business Size

Conclusion

Why Use SOP Templates?

Before reviewing the top SOP template platforms, understanding why templates provide such immense value is critical:

1. Save Significant Time

Crafting comprehensive SOPs completely from scratch can take hundreds of employee hours across researching best practices, optimizing workflows, documentation authoring, stakeholder reviews and testing.

High quality templates created by industry experts provide an immense headstart – cutting the SOP development process in half or better. Most offer easily editable formats like Word, Google Docs, or Notion to customize to a company‘s specific needs, terminology, brand voice and unique requirements.

2. Derived From Best Practices

Top templating providers design SOP frameworks tailored to different departments, roles and industries based on well-established laws, regulations, lessons learned, templates and academic research around optimizing workflows.

For example, guidelines to ensure IT infrastructure compliance with ISO 27001 standards or create SEC-aligned cyber security incident response protocols. Smartsheet and Process Street templates embed such proven practices natively, saving teams significant research and alignment efforts.

3. Promote Cross-Functional Consistency

As companies scale, inconsistent protocols between departments can severely inhibit productivity and quality. For instance:

  • Sales and Marketing misaligned around lead hand-offs, slowing conversions
  • Finance managing budgets differently than Project Managers, creating overruns
  • HR lacking standardized termination procedures from department managers

Great templates provide a reliable baseline for teams across functional areas of the business to align efforts through standardized protocols tailored for typical roles and workflows.

4. Adaptability to Specific Requirements

It‘s important to note that most templates still provide complete flexibility around modifying and appending procedures & control logic where required to address unique aspects of team objectives, regional regulations and edge use cases.

For example, additional compliance controls specific information security policies for customer healthcare data. Or language translations to support global business units.

Now let‘s explore some of the best SOP template sources available across essential business functions.

SOP Template Provider Deep Dives

1. Smartsheet

Smartsheet‘s vast template library covers core business teams…

2. ClickUp

ClickUp‘s excellent templates enable organized documentation through intuitive checklists…

3. Guru

As the leader in easily accessible company knowledge management, Guru‘s SOP templates…

4. ScribeHow

With deep specialization around regulatory compliance…

5. Process Street

Process Street‘s vast template repository curates…

6. TemplateLab

TemplateLab‘s editable Word SOPs…

7. JotForm

JotForm‘s interactive questionnaire templates simplify documenting…

8. Notion

Notion‘s fexible templates support…

9. Kipwise

Kipwise‘s templates centralize around core business teams like sales, marketing, HR…

Daily Tasks SOP Checklists

While broader departmental SOP template provide excellent high-level frameworks, distiling protocols down into specific task checklists can further boost user adoption and day-to-day reliability.

Here are some examples of daily SOP task checklists useful for department Leads to provide team members based on templates highlighted above:

Marketing

  • [ ] Analyze latest campaign analytics in Google Analytics and create report [Mon, Weds]
  • [ ] Post new blog content per editorial calendar topics [Mon, Thurs]
  • [ ] Complete daily social media content scheduling for the week [Friday AM]
  • [ ] Run updated keyword reports in SEMRush to optimize rankings [Friday PM]
  • [ ] Send weekly email campaign through MailChimp to subscriber list [Fridays]

Sales

  • [ ] Review latest Salesforce report of open opportunities and activity metrics [Daily AM]
  • [ ] Perform outreach to 5 new leads identified from marketing [Daily PM]
  • [ ] Complete demo walkthroughs for booked meetings [As scheduled]
  • [ ] Enter closed deal data into Salesforce with confirmations [As completed]

Customer Support

  • [ ] Review helpdesk system for new tickets and critical issues [AM shift start]
  • [ ] Respond to all Priority 1 inquiries within 1 hour [Daily]
  • [ ] Complete documentation improvements for common issues [Friday PM]
  • [ ] Escalate bugs needing engineering triage [As encountered]

IT & Engineering

  • [ ] Review server, network, application monitoring dashboards [Daily AM]
  • [ ] Perform capacity planning checks on production infrastructure [Monday AM]
  • [ ] Complete code testing checklists for release candidates [As scheduled]
  • [ ] Deploy updated components to production environments [Sundays]

Finance & Accounting

  • [ ] Review financial statements and identify any data quality issues [Daily AM]
  • [ ] Load latest expenses and billings transactions into accounting system [As incurred]
  • [ ] Perform accounts reconciliations across sub-ledgers [Weekly]
  • [ ] Manage monthly financial closes process [Monthly by 5th business day]

HR

  • [ ] Conduct 30,60 and 90 day check-ins with new employees [As scheduled]
  • [ ] Complete bi-weekly payroll processing [Every other Monday]
  • [ ] Review employee vacation balances reports [Monthly]
  • [ ] Schedule competency training sessions for managers [Quarterly]

Recommendations By Business Size

While all organizations can derive value from SOP best practices codified through templates, ideal solutions tend to vary based on company size and maturity stage:

Early Stage Startups

  • Flexible requirements – Iterating quickly on operations and priorities demands adaptable SOP maintenance.

  • Tighter budgets – Free or low-cost tools best for early stage. Can invest more in customization later.

Consider: Process Street, Notion, Kipwise

Growth Stage Startups & SMBs

  • Scaling complexity – More moving parts across geographies and specialized departments. Need standardized ways of working.

  • Expanding compliance – Adding larger customers brings contractual governance and regulations requirements needing documented controls.

Consider: Smartsheet, Guru, ScribeHow

Mid-Market & Large Enterprises

  • Inconsistent tribal knowledge – Harder to reliably share and retain institutional knowledge across global divisions.

  • Stricter Compliance – Increased regulatory scrutiny necessitates buttoned-up formally documented procedures on internal controls and protocols.

Consider: Smartsheet, Process Street, ScribeHow

Conclusion

SOPs provide the backbone of efficient operations, quality output and governance as organizations scale. Unfortunately common deterrants like lack of expertise and available time slow adoption – especially for resource constrained SMBs.

Professionally designed SOP templates help accelerate creation of comprehensive protocols for enhanced productivity, compliance and centralized knowledge retention. Each platform assessed provides excellent starting points for core company functions – configurable to specialized environments.

Remember that importing generic templates is just the first step. Carefully review pre-built procedures against internal existing protocols, requirements and workflows before full deployment. Append, modify or overwrite template guidance where appropriate to best optimize for the organization. Implement updated procedures in phased roll-outs for smoother adoption.

Then revisit SOPs consistently as processes evolve across departments to further promote cross-functional consistency.