Technology Tools Every Small Business Should Be Using

If you own a small business, you know there is not a lot of time to be spent hunting down just the right tool for a job.  You want to know someone has gone before you and found that perfect tool for the job ahead of you.  You would also prefer those tools are easy to use and setup, too, right!?  In this first post in the series, I will address the tools that I would be lost without in my own business and how to use them to make yours run more like a sewing machine than an old Ford.  In following posts, I will dig into each tool in detail, help you get it setup, and show you some ways I have made them sing.  Let’s get started…

In today’s business world it is almost impossible to communicate with your customers without email.  google has made a name for themselves by building an impressive infrastructure.  This means that you will almost always (nothing is perfectly certain, right?) be able to get to your email.  google provides their own native apps on every platform under the sun and has stellar web applications.  With a google apps for work subscription, you can use your own domain for email and gain some pretty good controls over use accounts.  I challenge you to find a suite of products with this much horsepower for $5 per user per month.  This is the only tool I use for email, calendar, contacts and a host of other productivity tasks.

With a little effort and the right tool, a small business can usually keep up with their own accounting records.  Wave provides a very basic set of those tools for the best price on the market, FREE.  In this tool, you can connect to your bank electronically to download transaction history, categorize transactions to keep everything straight, build estimates, send invoices, and collect payment for those invoices seamlessly.  If you have an iOS device you can also download their receipt and invoice apps that enable you to create invoices and accept payments from anywhere you have an internet connection or scan your receipts with the device’s camera.  Customers are sure to pay more promptly if you make it easy on them.   My favorite part of this tool is the credit card payment options integrated into the invoices.

Most of you probably either have sticky notes scattered all over your desk, a trusty notepad where you throw all the things you need to do, or you forget a lot of the great ideas you have.  With Evernote, you can keep track of all those great ideas, lists, and just about anything else.  Once you’ve gotten it all captured, though, you can still get to it from anywhere.  Evernote offers native apps on all platforms and curates a substantial list of companion apps that will only stand to enhance your experience with evernote.  Surely you’ve dreamed of being able to have your notes with you wherever you go.  Evernote has made this a reality.

If you have many tasks that go beyond a single step, you can probably get away with calling that a project.  If it involves a team and has more than one step, you will certainly need help tracking progress and next steps.  Asana is a dead-simple tool that allows you to organize by customers, projects, tasks, and then assign those tasks and projects to members of your team.  I personally use it to capture and then capture progress on the tasks within a project.  As with many tools I recommend, Asana is free for up to 5 team members and has mobile apps for android and iOS.

If you have only logins and passwords for the tools I’ve recommended this far, you already need a better method than sticky note to keep up with all of the user names and passwords.  Some of the biggest security problems facing small businesses today stem from choosing simple passwords for vital accounts or insecure methods of saving those passwords.  Lastpass provides very clean browser integration that includes a secure password generator.  If you need to grant someone access to one of your accounts stored in Lastpass, you can share it with them without them ever actually knowing the password.  They offer a free account, but I like the additional features (primarily the mobile app) that come with the bargain price of $12 per year.  If you need it for a bigger organization, Lastpass also offers Enterprise subscriptions that give you even more control over how your employees are generating and storing passwords.

If you bill customers hourly, you need a good way to track your time.  Most of you could benefit from time tracking even if not for billing purposes.  HoursTracker is iOS only, but its simple interface full feature set make it an easy sell.  HourTracker works like an advanced time clock.  You create jobs which you can use to track the billing rate for that job (customer or task), setup locations so you are clocked in automatically when you get to a job site, track billing periods for each job, and categorize jobs with tags.  Having all of this tracking power on my phone sometimes leads me to pretend I’m a ninja consultant.  Doesn’t everyone wish they were a ninja.

To be successful in business, you need customers.  The customers you have need special care so they stay that way and you should always be chasing new customers.  The idea of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is not new but has sometimes been reserved as an idea for those bigger guys.  If you truly want to build lifelong customers, you will have to have a relationship with them.  Zoho CRM helps you keep track of your contacts at existing customers, appointments, notes about your interactions with these customers, and leads for tracking potential customers.  If you have employees interacting with customers, this tool also allows you to see how that is going with reports and an activity feed.

You can’t always take two appointments on opposite ends of town in the same day unless you don’t have to travel to both.  Skype gives you the ability to conduct a video call that really gets as close to being there as you can hope for.  Other tools exist for this same purpose, but Skype performs better and is on a broader range of platforms so your customers don’t have to jump through too many hoops to connect with you.  This is a tool that is as useful for business as personal, though.  If you do have to travel out of town, your family will be glad for the same connection without the performance issues that occur on other video chat platforms.

There are a lot of cloud storage providers out there and each has its advantages.  I chose to write about Dropbox because, though I use all of them, it is still my favorite.  You can easily keep your documents sync’d across all of your devices, share folders or documents with customers easily, and you never have to worry about losing your documents.  With this tool, a copy is kept on your PC and in the cloud.  You still want to have a good backup, of course, but Dropbox is a good fit in your overall strategy.  The first 5GB are free.  This is pretty good for most people.  Beyond that, you can get a terabyte for $99 per year.  If you have 5 or more employees that need this great tool, you can upgrade to Dropbox for Business for $750 per year for the first 5 users and gain a number of great administration tools.

If you ever have problems to track, you will wish you had a way to keep up with them.  Spiceworks is a tool that is designed for an IT Help Desk function.  It can, however, be adapted to track any type of trouble.  For example, you want to know when the widgets you are selling customers break.  This tool comes in a number of flavors from a free and slimmed down cloud hosted version that you can have up and running in an hour to an on-premise solution that includes IT inventory tools.  If you are supporting customers, this is a great tool to keep up with what is breaking, where you might need to beef up your documentation, or just track internal requests for coffee and light bulb changes.  If you are technology inclined, the Spiceworks community is an excellent resource for product information and technical advice.

What are you waiting for?  Get out there and start playing with these tools.  In the coming weeks, I will publish the rest of this series that will get you started with each of these tools and give you some good ideas for using them to boost efficiency and profits in your business.  If you are absolutely lost but want to get started, Contact Us, we would love the opportunity to serve your business.