As one small business owner to another, any technology out there that can help should be tried at least once to see if it is beneficial to your business. Are you tracking expenses with an excel sheet or managing projects in a Google Doc? For the new year, lets resolve to try and put an end to all this insanity. Here are some of the top apps that you may or may not have heard of that are worth a try in 2016.
Wave: Cloud Accounting
You don’t need to keep track of your hours, spending, and income on an excel! More than one million business owners trust Wave to track more than $60 billion in income and spending. The best part of all — it’s free to use. Wave’s accounting app is 100 percent free for entrepreneurs, freelancers and small businesses with nine employees or less. Wave will connect with your bank account, PayPal, or other sources of data, but you will still need to categorize your incomes and expenses. Transactions will automatically appear in the accounting list. You can quickly generate professional reports such as balance sheets and sale tax reports and if you require small business payroll, Wave will automatically sync with your accounting software.
Asana: Project Management/Collaboration: Asana
Asana is a wonderful project management application that Time-Savers uses to track projects, communicate with co-workers, and stay organized. Asana makes it easy to see what’s going on with each project without the need for endless amounts of emails, phone calls, and recurring meetings. The platform allows you to communicate about each project via their comment box and each of these comments stays with each project. You can even upload documents needed for a project without having to go through numerous amounts of files or emails. Asana even updates you via email when someone has done something new on a project, or a deadline is approaching.
Hootsuite: Social Media Management
Although this is not a new app, this is still a great one to use to simplify management of your social media accounts. You can manage all of your social media accounts from one dashboard using this tool while receiving multiple analytic reports on how well your social media accounts are impacting your targeted viewers and followers. Hootsuite Pro is built specifically for small and medium businesses and provides reports that help you know how to tweak your tweets and posts to see a better performance rating from them. There are other platforms out there such as Buffer and TweetDeck, but Hootsuite definitely stands out.
The bottom line is these tools will help save you time which will allow you to spend more time on making your business prosperous. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you can handle everything on your own, find a tool that works well for you and your team!