Applications Every Small Business Owner Should Know About
Owning a small business means taking on a huge variety of responsibilities. Suddenly you need to know legal jargon, act as a hiring manager, perform accounting tasks, and learn how to market — all at the same time. Juggling all these tasks requires extraordinary time management skills and exorbitant patience. But what if there was a way to simplify and organize your business so that it’s more manageable? Thanks to modern technology, there are a ton of tools that can help simplify your life. Here are some applications that every small business owner should know.
QuickBooks
This is perhaps one of the most popular accounting applications, with thousands of positive reviews to its name. QuickBooks helps run your business while providing an easy-to-understand overview of your finances. It definitely beats manual input and documenting receipts. Track expenses, download comprehensive reports on gains and losses, pay employees, organize and send invoices, and so much more. The application connects seamlessly to your bank accounts, PayPal, and Square. If you’re not a fan of QuickBooks, try another established accounting application such as FreshBooks or Expensify.
Slack
Communication is key — in any kind of business. You need to maintain constant streams of input between partners, employees, and business associates. Slack allows you to set up private and public group threads and categorize them the way you want. Have more than one business? You can use a different slack account for each entity. The application also allows you to drag and drop PDFs, Word documents, and photos for easy file sharing. Slack is a great way to reduce internal email use and transform how you communicate with your team. Other effective communication apps worth mentioning include Skype, join.me, and Addappt.
Facebook Pages Manager
If you’re just starting out, you might not have made much progress yet with your social media pages, but developing them as soon as possible is recommended for marketing purposes. Consider your brand and the work you’ve put in it so far. When you first built your website, did you use a helpful tool in order to set up the domain name? Did you utilize any input from the internet to build your website? There are tools to help manage your social media pages too — highlighting Facebook here, as that seems to be the most necessary social page for a small business to have at this time. Facebook Pages Manager keeps up with activity on different pages and interacts with your audience. It simplifies the messaging process while providing helpful insights in the form of push notifications.
DocuSign
DocuSign might be the most useful application when it comes to signing documents, without necessitating the need for a fax machine — or even a pen or paper. This application provides a way to sign documents electronically and can also link collected signatures and documents to Cloud Storage. DocuSign is an easy-to-use application that eliminates the hassle of signing documents — ideal for any kind of business.
Proven Hiring
Simplify the hiring process with this unique, comprehensive app. Develop a job post and allow the application to post to all major job sites instantaneously — the first of its kind with the capacity to do so. In addition, the application offers job description templates that can help write your job post and be one step closer to hiring a quality team.
Rescue Time
This application is designed to help better manage your time. It tracks how long you’ve spent on individual applications throughout the day so that at the end you get a clear picture of how productive you were. The application sets productivity alerts, blocks distractions, and provides detailed reports of your time usage. For many people, productivity is all about realization. Once you’ve been made aware that you’re spending too much time on one task, or perhaps surfing Facebook, you can adjust your priorities.
Square
As far as payment applications go, this might be the easiest for small business owners to use. While PayPal still stands its ground in the electronic realm, Square makes for increased physical payment accessibility. The application provides businesses with a small, compact card reader that can be attached to a phone or other device to contract fast, painless payments. Although it charges per transaction, its unbeatable convenience is worth its weight in gold.
MailChimp
If your goal is to build a large subscriber list, you’re going to want a convenient platform to help with email campaigns. MailChimp is absolutely free and allows you to organize subscriber lists, build attractive campaigns, preview them in mobile and desktop mode, and send them out to customers. It is one of the most easy-to-use marketing tools of its kind. MailChimp is ideal for any small business that wants to keep their marketing tactics simple and efficient.
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