To run a small business successfully – to have one that is growing and thriving and not just making enough to pay the utility bills – you need to fill a lot of roles, from finance and sales to product development.
In today’s tech-heavy economy, there are lots of programs or “apps” out there to help you be the expert you need to be in these various roles. The choices though are mind-boggeling. According to Apple, more than 1,000 apps are added each day to its App Store every day.
Some apps are standing the test of time of being truly outstanding choices for business owners. This summer, NerdWallet – an excellent site for anyone looking for ways to cut costs – listed 25 of its favorites.
Thinker Ventures is a small business development firm that prides itself on helping entrepreneurs grow their businesses through smarter business practices and choosing the right technology. You can’t go wrong really with any of the NerdWallet suggestions, but we’ve cut NerdWallet’s list down even further.
Here are our suggestions:
Finance:
QuickBooks Online allows you to access QuickBooks on your iPhone, iPad, Android phone or Android. It’s not free, but there is no more all-encompassing program that allows you to connect to accounts, upload data and view up to the minute financial reports.
Communication:
At Thinker, we endorse Slack off this list. Its instant messaging platform allows you to organize a team’s conversation into separate or public channels and makes it easy to share images, PDFs and other files. Slack users experience a nearly 50 percent drop in emails. That’s about as big a time saver as you can find in today’s workplace.
Time management:
RescueTime automatically tracks time spent on websites and applications and sends you reports to give you a snapshot of how you spent your day. RescueTime Lite is free, but the pay version is reasonable – $72 for the year – and allows you to block distracting websites and includes more detailed reports and filters.
File storage:
Dropbox has 500 million users, making it the most popular platform to store and share files on the cloud. Teams with more than five employees can buy a business plan for $12.50 per month vastly expanding storage capability.
Apps not on NerdWallet’s list that you should check out?
Asana, a program to track a team’s work and manage projects.
Teamwork allows you to see all a team’s tasks in one place, collaborate and work in real time.
Uber Conference is an excellent, free way to do conference calls.
Google Keep allows you to quickly take and save notes, photos, voice memos and checklist and then access them again on any other web-connected device.
This is the season of New Years resolutions. A good one would be to test out some of these apps so that you can more effectively spend time on growing your business.
Nice article!