With over 2 million apps in the app store there is no shortage of programs that can help you be more productive and lets face it,running a small business can be a challenge where you need all the help you can get. Here are the five best apps currently out in the market to enable you to save time and money when running your business:
- Buffer is one of the top social media tools out in the market, it allows you to schedule your posts on various social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others. This will allow you to schedule all of your social media posts once or twice a week and free up your time to run your business. You can also use Buffer Analytics to identify your best performing posts and re-post them. This will help you to increase engagement on social media and for you to see what your audience is responding to best over time.
- Slack is a team communication tool that allows you to organize your team in groups called channels or you can send a private message to an employee. For example, you can create a channel called all employees where you send a message and all of your employees will be able to see and reply to it, you can create another channel per department so each department can have its own team communication system. Slack also lets you share files including pdfs and images.Another great feature is Slack’s search functionality which enables you to find key information quickly, even if it’s inside of a document you’ve shared.
- ezClocker is an easy to use and affordable time tracking and scheduling software. Employees can use their own device iPhone or Android as a mobile time clock to clock in or out and view their schedule in real time. The employer can view the location of the clock in via a GPS map so they can confirm the employee was at the correct location when clocking in. You can also export the time sheets to a file that can be read easily by Excel or email it to your Payroll manager. If you have a business with remote employees such as janitorial services, construction companies, contractors, sales departments, landscape businesses, etc. then this app is highly recommended for you.
- Asana is a project management tool where you can keep track of projects and assign team members to tasks or projects. It makes it easy to know who’s responsible for what and what next steps are. If you are still primarily using email and excel to manage tasks and projects you need a more efficient way to keep track of things and Asana is your tool. Some of the benefits you get out of using this appare: when you create a task, you can add descriptions, subtasks, and attachments to collect everything you need in one place. So when you start that piece of work, you can quickly open any resources and links and get straight into your work. It’s also simple to use and makes managing your workload very easy. As you set due dates and tasks are assigned to you, tasks get pushed to your “Today” view so you always know what to work on next.
- Freshbooks: is a super easy to use accounting software which helps you send invoices to your customers but not just that it allows you to see when your customers looked at the invoices, automatically sends reminders, and keeps track of how long each customer typically takes to pay so you can plan ahead. Freshbooks also allows your customers to pay via the software which is great. Another feature of the software is that it helps you keep track of expenses by simply clicking a picture of a receipt and attach the snap to an item to log the expense or attach it to an invoice.
