Top 8 Productivity Tools for Small Business Owners
As the owner of a small business, you understand that the environment and economy in which you work are always evolving, causing you to evolve too in order to keep up. While this can be an exciting thing for small businesses, opening up new possibilities and markets, it can take a toll on you and your operating system as a whole. Luckily, as we move further and further into the digital age, new tools and technologies are constantly being invented to help small businesses like yours thrive and grow. With so many options to choose from, we are here to shed some light on these tools and help you decide what is best for your small business. Below, take a look at the most effective apps and tools we recommend to streamline operations and boost productivity—
Accounting and Finance Tools
Managing your business’s finances can feel like a massive job—that’s where tools like QuickBooks, FreshBooks, and Autobooks come in. Each of these can serve as a huge help to your small business, streamlining the processes of invoicing, tracking expenses, payroll, and receiving payments from your customers. QuickBooks is one of the most popular of these tools, functioning as an all-in-one accounting program for business owners to help them easily manage all aspects of their finances. If you are looking for an alternative to QuickBooks, take a look at FreshBooks, a user-friendly accounting program that is well-suited to small businesses and freelancers. Autobooks is another wonderful program to help you manage your business’s finances with digital invoicing, easy and quick payment acceptance from customers, accounting, and reporting. Plus, all 1st Advantage customers have access to Autobooks for free!
Project Management Tools
Making sure that all of your business’s projects are assigned and running smoothly is crucial. To help make this a constant reality, look into apps like Clickup, Asana, and Monday. These apps are customizable project managers that help you and your team organize projects, efficiently track time and progress, and collaborate easily. Clickup offers a comprehensive and flexible platform for you and your team to see everything related to your projects all in one place. You can easily assign, set priorities, and track each project as you go. Asana is another excellent project manager tool that streamlines and simplifies your tasks, ideal for both small and larger teams. If your team benefits best from a more visual approach, try Monday! It visualizes work in easy to understand columns, boards, and dashboards that eliminate any hassle you might have dealing with a digital project manager.
Communication and Collaboration Tools
In many small businesses, employees and collaborators are working from many different locations at the same time, making communicating with the whole team effectively a difficult task. One of the best ways to keep everyone on the same page at the same time is to utilize tools like Slack, Clickup Chat, and Microsoft Teams. In addition to being user friendly chat platforms, these apps also include video and audio calling features, file sharing, project organization tools, and much more. What’s more, each of these tools is able to integrate with other apps and programs like Outlook, other Microsoft apps, Google drive, Dropbox, and so much more, allowing them to blend seamlessly into your already functioning system.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
As your small business gains more traction, managing your customer relationships becomes more and more vital. There is a great deal of data that goes into maintaining these relationships, and without the right tools, it can easily slip through the cracks. This is where customer relationship management (CRM) tools can make a big difference. These tools track your interaction, giving you insights into customer behavior that you can use to best plan your customer relationship and sales strategies. Instead of looking at market or economy trends, why not use the data from your own business to improve customer satisfaction? These tools also often feature communication outlets and task tracking to help you make sure everyone in your team is on the same page. If you are looking for a free CRM tool with these features to help your small business, take a look at HubSpot CRM. For a more advanced version, Zoho CRM is a great place to start. Salesforce is the tried and tested CRM tool used by some of the biggest and most successful businesses out there, and it just so happens to have a program tailored for small businesses—Salesforce Essentials.
Human Resources and Payroll Tools
Building and maintaining your perfect team is a crucial part of running a business, no matter the size. Handling HR and payroll can be a hassle, and even small errors can lead to much larger problems. Make HR and payroll easy with tools developed to do just that. With these tools, you can easily handle benefits, time-off requests, onboarding, organizing employee information, and tracking performance. Gusto is one of these tools that is ideal for small businesses, with many of the features listed above and a user-friendly setup that will make all your HR and payroll needs a breeze. Another to consider is BambooHR, which offers comprehensive, award-winning solutions to simplify your HR processes. If you are a the owner of a startup with fewer than 500 employees, take a look at Bambee, which connects you with a dedicated HR manager who will help with tailoring an HR program specific to your business needs.
Marketing and Social Media Management Apps
In today’s modern age, digital marketing and social media are essential in promoting your business, but with so many platforms to market and post on, this can quickly become an overwhelming task if you are going at it alone. Luckily, with the rise in the need for social media engagement and digital marketing has come a number of apps and programs that can take care of this process for you. Platforms like Hootsuite, Later, and Socialpilot all offer a wide range of important features, including actual content creation, post scheduling, and tracking analytics. For small businesses with otherwise limited resources, these programs can help you stay competitive in today’s digital landscape.
Document Management and Collaboration Help
It’s a tale as old as business itself—saving, organizing, and managing documents can be a huge hassle, especially for small business owners who are juggling many roles at once. Using programs like Google Workspace can be a life saver in this situation. Google Workspace is a convenient suite of user-friendly tools, including Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, that help you to not only securely save and organize your online work, but also collaborate in real time on everything from drafting letters to creating slide presentations. What’s more, a majority of the tools in Google Workspace save automatically as you go, so you will never have to worry about losing your work. To ensure that both you and your colleagues can easily collaborate and access files from anywhere, look into using Dropbox, a software for secure file storage and sharing. You can save nearly any type of file in Dropbox where your collaborators can access it with ease.
Cloud Storage and File Sharing
Now that you have your work tools, you are going to need a secure and trustworthy place to save all of your work. Depending on the workspace tools you use, there are specific platforms that will work best for your needs. For example, if you use Google Workspace, saving your files in Google Drive is the most convenient and streamlined way to keep everything in order. Google Drive is cloud-based, and easily shareable with colleagues, making collaboration a breeze. If you use Microsoft Office apps, the best companion platform would be Microsoft OneDrive, also serving as a secure place to store your files and share them with colleagues. If you have a sizable amount of data floating around in your saving platforms, consider investing in something like IDrive, which provides ample storage and protection through regular online backups so you never lose a thing.
Having the help of these tools and apps in your small business can help keep it organized, productive, and up to date with all of your tasks and responsibilities. In addition, having everything streamlined through these helpful apps and programs can free you as the business owner up to start working on growing and/or improving your business. When it comes to helping you reach your small business goals, we here at 1st Advantage Bank know a thing or two. We are proud to offer many banking solutions specifically tailored to aid small businesses in a number of facets—whether you are looking to finance your business, open new locations, simplify your banking methods, or need some expert advice, we are ready and able to help you. If you are curious about our services or need some help or advice, do not hesitate to contact us. We are and have always been committed to building up our local small businesses in any way we can. Member FDIC and Equal Housing Lender