Navigating a small business toward success requires teamwork, a solid sense of direction, tremendous patience, and a handful of software. The right tools can make a big difference to the job. However, choosing the right software is a challenging feat. The secret is recognizing the proper software in combination with other tools to serve your nature of work is important. Check out some useful software tools to help you run your small business.
Wave: Best Accounting Software
Kirk Simpson and James Lochrie founded Wave Accounting in 2010 to bring an easy-to-use, free financial software to the market. In 2021, Wave’s employee base has crossed the 250 mark and they’re working to serve small businesses across the world. It lets companies track expenses and income, scan receipts, send invoices, track sales taxes, and much more – for free!
Wave builds a network between credit cards and multiple bank accounts and helps set up profiles to keep track of finances. This free software organized payments, invoices, and accounts to make tax calculation easier. Users can make and send professional invoices from the dashboard as well as the mobile app. Wave can set automatic credit card payments and recurring invoices for repeat customers so they can get their invoice and payment details immediately.
Apart from their free services, Wave also offers premium, paid services, including bank payments, credit card payment, payroll setup for contractors and employers.
Wix: Best Website Builder
Frustrated with the high costs of making a website, three entrepreneurs joined forces to create Wix in 2006. Today, the company boasts a user base of 200 million spread across 190 countries. This is our pick because Wix lets users create professional websites without any required coding knowledge at a budget-friendly rate.
On Wix, you will find many professional templates to personalize your website. Pair that with the convenient drag-and-drop editorial feature and anyone could make a functional website within a few hours. All websites are designed to look attractive on mobile devices and offer interesting effects like video backgrounds, animation, and scrolling.
As Wix features an advanced e-commerce feature, users can sell online as well. You can set up an online store, figure out conversion rates and revenue, manage inventory and more. Wix is compatible with PayPal, Wix Payments, and Stripe and can integrate with Facebook and Instagram.
MailChimp: Best Email Marketing Software
MailChimp was founded in 2001 and since then has been an affordable email marketing service perfect for small businesses. Now a diverse marketing platform, MailChimp offers websites, landing pages, postcards, and many more amazing features. Both free and paid plans will be a great choice for small business, but you can go a long way without paying a dollar – the best part of this service. You can easily start using the free email software.
On MailChimp, you can get pre-made email templates, basic customization, opt-in sign up forms and popups, and audience segmentation. A mobile app is included as well to let you check campaign performance, send emails, and create reports with just a few clicks.
Using the drag-and-drop templates, you can create professional emails with little to no design skills on MailChimp. The software keeps track of clicks and open rates while segmenting data to let you know what’s working best for your small business.
Trello: Best Project Management Software
In 2011, Fog Creek Software introduced a project management tool prototype designed to provide high-level planning solutions. Within just a year, the platform had more than 500,000 users and was named Trello. Trello impresses with its flexible, visual, and free options to manage projects.
Featuring a Kanban-style board for project and task tracking, Trello makes project management extremely easy. The intuitive and simple interface lets users make customer lists and boards with a plethora of inclusions such as images, checklists, links, due dates, regular files, and more.
Trello can be integrated with Google Drive, Slack, Dropbox, as well as many other third-party software. Integrate it with mobile apps to streamline workflows and collaboration.
Even with its free plan, the software has a lot to offer, including unlimited lists, cards, and boards. However, there is a 10MB per file attachment limit to be mindful of. It extends to 250MB with the paid plan.
Slack: Best Team Communication Software
With Slack, you can create channels revolving around a particular topic, project, team, or client. The channels can be public for all Slack account holders or it can be private and accessible via invitation only.
Apart from real-time communication, Slack offers a slew of fantastic features like poll creation, meeting scheduling, file sharing between teams, cloud storage, and connection to third-party projects – all through integrations. You get free voice and video calls and also spin-off discussion threads in order to keep the larger conversation organized.
Small businesses that only require a single workspace, a handful of integrations, and one-on-one video calls can benefit from a free Slack account. There is a 10,000-message search limitation on free accounts, though.
Day Off: Absence and Vacation Tracker
One of the most important tools for a business’ HR department is an employee tracker app. Productivity and efficiency depends largely on the availability of the employees, not to mention their satisfaction with their workplace. With Day Off, you save time and effort with employee absence. You can track individual and team absences from one place and it takes a few seconds to check up on leave applications and accept/deny them.
The convenient HR dashboard brings everything on one platform for the HRM. Requests are directed to the right person. HR can also define teams while setting available vacation days left for each person. The mobile app makes it easy for both employees and manager.
Conclusion
A software doesn’t necessarily have to be “premium” to deliver quality services. Small businesses can cut down on costs by looking into the more budget-friendly options.