Getting your small business off the ground can be a daunting process. Things can easily get chaotic and incredibly time-consuming as you plan, organize, manage employees, handle papers, and handle finances. To keep your sanity, you need as much help as possible.
Taking advantage of online tools and apps is a great way to make your job as a small business owner easier, especially with the abundance of tools and apps available today. However, this abundance is a concern in and of itself, so choosing those tools that will help rather than hinder your business can become an extra chore. The following tools can be incredibly useful for any small business, whether you’re just starting or you’re an established one. Let’s check them out!
1. Communication and collaboration: Slack
Every aspect of life requires communication, including business. To avoid miscommunication problems that can be easily avoided, everyone needs to be well informed and on the same page. It’s for this reason that an app for chatting amongst all of you is needed.
When you have a team of more than 2-3 people, something more advanced like Slack would be a good choice instead of Skype or WhatsApp. It makes communication between teams much easier with Slack’s individual and group messaging features. If you use the Pro plan, you can have 15 teammates, whereas the free plan allows only one-to-one video calls.
Over 2,400 apps can be integrated with Slack, making it a powerful tool. It’s also possible to use various apps from Slack directly, including Google Calendar, Zapier, Zoom, and project management apps such as Paymo, Asana, or Trello. Slack users can receive appointment and task notifications directly from Google Calendar or Paymo, for instance.
The Slack app offers both a free and a paid plan, starting at $6.67 per user per month.
The free version can be tried, but it has one major drawback:
- There are only 10,000 recent messages that you can view from your team.
Other things to note about the free version of Slack:
- If your team is simply looking to integrate with 10 other apps, the free plan may be sufficient for them.
- If you integrate Zoom into Slack, you can make group calls. If you don’t, you’ll end up with nothing more than one-on-one voice calls and video calls.
- There are complaints about the app not working well on Android, with some having trouble logging in or receiving notifications.
2. Google Meet: Video Conferencing
Video conferencing has become a necessity for online meetings and even events in a world where many people freelance or work remotely. Communication between employees, suppliers, business partners, and customers, in particular, has become increasingly digital for small businesses. Google Meet is an excellent video conferencing service for businesses. If you are going for the free option of Google Meet, it might be a better option for a small business than Zoom.
With Google Meet’s free plan, you can hold a meeting for up to 60 minutes, unlike Zoom’s 40-minute limit. When choosing between two free plans, you may want to consider this if your meetings tend to last longer. You do not need to download an app to use Google Meet; you just sign in with your Google account. It can also be used with other Google services. A free meeting can include up to 100 participants with Google Meet and Zoom. Meeting scheduling software works well with both of them, which saves time.
Pricing: You might be satisfied with the free plan, but if you need more features, choose the Business Starter plan, which costs $6/user/month.
3. With Flipsnack, you can publish digitally
Catalogs, brochures, or other promotional materials are essential for small businesses. Any business can use Flipsnack to create digital documents, such as magazines, catalogs, brochures, flyers, and reports, and download them in various formats.
The Flipsnack’s Design Studio allows you to create an interactive digital brochure from a PDF document, or you can use template designs to create your own from scratch. The following tips will help you create a digital brochure that will showcase your company and attract new customers. Business brochure templates from their site can be used by businesses and organizations in diverse industries, such as fashion, health & fitness, education, and marketing. Due to Flipsnack’s MLS integration, realtors can also use their digital brochures for real estate business since they can simply change the listings’ information.
Pricing: There are three paid subscription plans other than the free one, which starts at $14 per month, $35 per month, and $79 per month respectively.
4. Using Trello for project management
You have to win every single day in the battle of organization and being on top of things if you are a small business owner. Keeping everything organized in your head or using a simple calendar and to-do list is virtually impossible.
Trello is ideal for small businesses, particularly if you have remote workers, as it is a comprehensive project management app. A Trello board can consist of cards, lists, and boards, so a business can organize it in a way that meets its own particular needs. Among Trello’s features are:
- Plan your week and organize your to-do lists.
- Project and resource management with a view of tasks.
- Setting goals.
- Collaboration within a team.
- Linking Google Docs to a card allows you to organize and share files with collaborators.
- Repetitive project management.
- For small businesses, Trello’s cards will suffice to manage your business relationships without the need for complex and separate CRM software.
Pricing: With Trello’s free plan, you’re guaranteed to have all the staff you’ll ever need, but if you want more features, consider upgrading to Business Class for $10/user/month.
Trello, however, is not always simple to use and does not provide as much automation as some users would like. Occasionally, team collaboration might be challenging due to a steep learning curve and individual preferences. Alternatively, you can use something straightforward like Paymo which also offers invoicing capabilities, if you find project management tools too complicated.
5. Buffer: Managing social media
A social media management tool like Buffer is essential if you want to stay on top of posts and messages on your social media accounts. If you do not use a tool like Buffer, promoting your company on social media is hard. With Buffer, you can manage social media in a variety of ways, including:
- Manage your social media channels by creating and scheduling posts.
- Automate the scheduling of content.
- A neat, clean, and easy-to-understand dashboard is- available to you.
- You can access all your social media messages from one inbox.
- Analyze social media reports and do marketing based on those stats.
These can be incredibly useful to you in gaining a better understanding of who your audience is and what they are interested in regarding your products, services, and content they find interesting.
You might consider these alternative social media management tools if you want to find one that may be better suited to your business. However, some users complained about the price being too high, poor customer support, and repeated errors and posting failures.
Pricing: Buffer offers publishing and analytics services separately. Publishing plans start at $56 per month for Premium, and $85 per month for Business, which are both great options for small businesses.
Two users and eight social channels are included in the Premium publishing plan. Six users and 25 social channels are included in the Business publishing plan. In-depth analytics can be added for $28/month with the Pro plan if you need them. Among the features included in the Premium analytics plan are Instagram Stories and Shopify analytics, as well as some extra reporting options.
6. Invoicing and accounting: FreshBooks
Managing paperwork, invoicing, and money is one of the most challenging aspects of running your own business – unless you happen to be an accountant who enjoys handling financial details and books.
FreshBooks is a great invoice and accounting software that helps even accountants make sense of their paperwork. With FreshBooks, you can manage invoices, estimates, reports, expenses, time tracking, and projects, as well as employ other accounting features. There are some customers, however, who complain that it is difficult to use the time tracking feature. Due to the huge jump from 50 billable clients to unlimited, people would also like to see a mid-range plan.
Pricing: FreshBooks offers a $15/month Lite plan with 5 billable customers, a $25/month Plus plan with 50 billable customers, and a $50/month Premium plan with unlimited billable clients.
Wave or Sunrise are great free accounting programs, especially for startups and small businesses with limited budgets. Upgrade to FreshBooks, which has more features, whenever you want.
Closing Thoughts
With these six online tools, you can make life quite easier for yourself as an owner of a small business. At the same time, they might help make your business a lot more efficient and streamlined. Are you familiar with any of these tools? If you’ve used any of these digital tools for your small business or have found other ones helpful, please share them in the comments below!
