Running a Small Business is filled with an endless array of opportunities to burn through your time. Particularly as a solopreneur or small team, an owner is tasked with juggling multiple facets of the business. Invoicing, cash flow management, marketing, lead generation, sales, team management.. all this comes before actually doing the work your business is set up to do.
Thankfully we are here in the year 2020, where whole industries have arisen to create and develop small business tools that help improve efficiency, manage time, reduce errors and make juggling multiple tasks at once somewhat more bearable. We have put together a list of small business tools we use to help make things easier for us and to enable us to spend more time focused on the key aspects that help grow our business. Let’s face it, nobody gets into business to manage invoices and keep track of which stage in the cycle every one of their leads is in. We are incredibly grateful there are apps and software that make these processes far less of a headache.
1. Xero (Accounting)
Having used Quickbooks for our Flyer Delivery Business and Xero for our main marketing services, Xero wins for us hands down. Granted, Quickbooks is cheaper (we are able to get subscriptions for $10 per month- email if interested), it’s just not as easy to use.
Without a large payroll to take care of and with essentially no ‘inventory’ to manage, Xero really is perfect for what we’re doing. The app lets you create and send invoices within 30 seconds and record expenses just as quickly. You can see exactly what your revenues and expenses are and the sources of each. You can compare periods with ease and see who owes you what and how far overdue they are. You can set up automatic reminders to ensure they know too… It really does make life so much easier and saves literally hours every week. It’s hard to imagine life without the modern-day accounting software. Quickbooks is great too, no question, however it’s just a little more clunky and not quite as streamlined.
Xero has caught on in a big way over the last year- just check the stock price (XRO)- it’s nearly doubled. The only downfall is the cost of a subscription. A standard option of $50 per month is just too high in the competitive market out there. We wouldn’t be surprised if that dropped in the near future.
Check out www.xero.com
2. Canva (Design)
What an incredible piece of software. Created by a UWA student in our home town of Perth, Canva has gone from strength to strength and is now one of the leading ‘unicorn’ startups anywhere in the world. For good reason.
The array of options and ease of use make this an essential small business tool for practically any industry out there. Create social media posts, business cards, reports, flyers, infographics.. it does it all.
It’s completely free for almost all features, though a few things, such as saving with a transparent background will cost $17.99 per month. For that price, it’s hard to go wrong.
Check out www.canva.com
Some of the Logos we have designed with Canva…
3. Google Drive (Storage & Collaboration)
We should probably include the whole G-Suite offering here, as we use it all. From Gmail to Google Calendar to Google My Business.. it’s all amazing.
Google Drive in particular, is an incredibly practical small business tool, still perhaps not utilised to it’s full capacity by many. It can be used to create and organise articles and content, track CRM, strore images & videos and much more. It essentially combines Microsoft Word, Excel and Dropbox all into 1, then makes the process of sharing and collaborating so much easier.
For Around $3 a month for 100gb of storage, you really can’t beat it. If you don’t store that much, all these great resources are completely free.
Check out www.google.com/drive/
4. Hootsuite (Social Media Scheduling)
Hootusite is one of those small business tools we would class as optional’ Unless you are posting regularly to Social Media, between multiple accounts (which you probably should be), it’s not necessary. There are also a number of other options that may be better suited to your business and circumstances. Later, Buffer, Loomly and many, many more are available, though we have found Hootsuite to be one of the easiest to use across multiple devices.
There are certainly a few issues, one of which being the cost. For 3 accounts, it’s free, which is perfect for most. However for 10 profiles, it jumps up to $39 a month. For 20, it’s $169 a month which is a little insane. As a small business however, go with the 3 accounts and you can’t go wrong. Otherwise, give this one a miss as it’s not a necessity.
Check out www.hootsuite.com
5. Hubspot (CRM and Lead Management)
Similar to Hootsuite, Hubspot is one of those small business tools you only need if you need it for a specific purpose. For us, that’s CRM and lead management. For this purpose, it’s got to be one of the best in the field.
From tracking where leads are coming from, to scheduling calls, tracking email correspondence and managing where in the lead stage a prospect may be, it’s an incredibly useful system that saves a ridiculous amount of time. Not to mention, it prevents leads from slipping through the cracks. It has the capacity to remind you when a lead needs to be re-contacted and even how likely they appear to be to go ahead. There are a million different integrations and options but that’s the gist of it, at least for what we use it for.
Highly recommended as a free version. We upgraded and were paying around $150 a month, though we found we didn’t really use many of the features beyond the free version anyway.
Check out www.hubspot.com
One of the best features of Hubspot is the ‘deals’ dashboard, where you can see all the leads in your pipeline and which point they are at.
6. Pandadoc (Contracts & Client Onboarding)
This is a very basic one. Essentially it is for creating documents such as contracts, onboarding sheets and proposals and sharing them with clients in a very simple and effective way. You can have contracts signed by both parties (legally binding) and track where in the process you may be. You can create templates to be used again and again with simple modifications where required.
Great piece of software for around $19 a month.
Check out www.pandadoc
7. Asana (Project Tracking & To Do)
This one is to keep you organised! Lay out all your projects and set schedules and dates for all the small parts. We were previously using Todoist but it wasn’t cutting the mustard. Asana is excellent at seeing what needs to be done and breaking big projects down into smaller chunks. Spreading out those chunks amongst your team is as simple as clicking a button.
You can track goals, track timelines, track productivity, it’s amazing. There are a few of these types of organisation platforms out there, Trello being another example that works well, though we’ve found Asana to be the best.
Free version is great if you’re flying solo, premium starts at $14.69 a month which is still pretty reasonable for how much time and mental capacity this saves.
Check out app.asana.com/
8. Google Keep Note (Notes)
For keeping track of notes, stats, practically anything you need to remember. There are a million of these apps for mobile out there these days, though this one works so well because it sinks across all of your Google systems.
Check out keep.google.com/ and get it from your app store.
9. Office Lens (Scanning, Archiving Documents)
This one is really cool. Something you don’t often consider is how easy it is these days to scan documents with your phone. There is absolutely no need for a scanner/printer combo in 2020.
OfficeLens is amazing in that you can scan something from an angle, say off a whiteboard and the app corrects it and saves it as though it were a flat document. Great for recording notes of a powerpoint or whiteboard, as well as scanning those signed documents.
Check out Office Lens on your app store.
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