As a small business owner, you have mountains of tasks to accomplish but very limited time – making it impossible stay on top, and feel like you’re thriving in the competitive field. Luckily, technology is on your side with a market flooded with apps for small business owners to help you stay organized, productive, and in-the-know while you’re constantly on the go.
Here are the 9 best apps for small businesses:
Sharing and Communication
Purpose: Project Management
Rating: 4.4 Stars
Users: 6 Million
Price: Free
Slack is a collaboration hub that brings your small business together, to make work simpler and highly productive. This is a networking platform, that allows you to share and connect with your colleagues to communicate progress, pending tasks and more without wasting valuable working time. You can create group chats, to unify all workers focusing on the same project, and drive your business forward in a pleasant way.
Finance
Purpose: Bookkeeping
Rating: 4.2 Starts
Users: 150,000
Price: Free (for first 14 days, then $16.58 a month)
Kashoo is a bookkeeping software specifically designed to provide a helping hand to small businesses – not accountants. Its intuitive platform allows you to see how your business is doing at a glance, sync your bank accounts, send invoices instantly, and more, in a way that makes sense. They ensure to help you stay organized and on top of your accounting efforts using simple language, and easy-to-use platform.
Productivity
Evernote
Purpose: Note Taking
Rating: 4.3 Stars
Users: 200 Million
Price: Free
Evernote is the perfect tool for keeping you organized. They claim to be “your second brain” and help you to capture, organize, share and remember all notes you have. With this tool small businesses can consolidate notes in various devices, making it easy to keep everyone up to date on updates and changes. Evernote saves all your important business notes and lets you enhance them with links, tables, attachments – effectively ensuring you work smarter.
Purpose: Task Management
Rating: 4.5 Stars
Users: 1.1 Million
Price: Free (Business class is $9.99 per month)
Trello is a productivity platform that lets you and your team collaborate effectively to get more done. Its interface allows you to create boards, lists, and cards to help you organize, prioritize and manage all projects you’re working on in a fun and flexible way. Trello utilizes visuals to present your project effectively. You can dive into the details, and add notes, comments and attachment to each card, so nothing gets left behind.
Scheduling
Purpose: Timekeeper
Rating: 2.9 Stars
Users:
Price: Essential Package $14 Per Month, Company Package $21 Per month
Timely is the perfect tool to keep track of the time you allocate to each task and various projects you’re working on. They aim to save time every day and help users utilize their time to get the most out of their day. With this tool, you can easily manage your profitability, productivity, and performance all in one place to determine your work efficiency.
Networking
Purpose: Professional Social Media Platform
Rating: 4.2 Stars
Users: 562 Million
Price: Free
Linkedin is the world’s largest professional network that aims to create economic opportunities for businesses of all sizes. This social media platform provides professionals with the opportunity to connect with others in their industry to become more productive and successful in all their endeavors.
Travel
Purpose: Route Optimization Tool
Rating: 3.9 Stars
Users: Hundreds of thousands
Price: Starts at $24.95.
MyRouteOnline is an easy-to-use online tool that helps you plan your daily routes and deliveries. Unlike Google, you can enter as many as 350 addresses into the tool and effortlessly receive an optimized route, and navigational directions. MyRouteOnline aims to create an optimized route by time or distance, ensuring you get the fastest or shortest route. This tool not only saves you hours of planning time, but also, lets you easily adjust your route, due to route changes or road hassles, letting you avoid backtracking, and effectively saving your small business valuable time and money.
Purpose: Gas Price Search
Rating: 4.6 Starts
Users: 70 Million
Price: Free (Choose how much you want to pay, either 30 Cents /gallon or 10 Cents)
GasBuddy is a community-driven platform that helps you save money by finding the most affordable gas prices for you. All you have to do is enter your zip code and gas type, and hit enter. You’ll be able to locate the cheapest gas prices near you, so you never have to pay full price. GasBuddy has a database of over 140,000 gas stations and real-time fuel price information and reviews. Meaning, with this app you’ll manage to find any gas station when you’re in urgent need, and not have to worry about overpaying.
Marketing
Purpose: Internet Marketing
Rating: 4.3 Stars
Users: 4 Million
Price: Free (You have to pay to make your ads visible on Google)
Google AdWords gives your small business the opportunity to be seen by customers from the first moment they begin their Google search. It’s the perfect platform to attract more customers and expand your small business. You can target specific geographics, and reach your right audience at the right time. The app provides you with numerous features that permit you to keep up with your campaign progress, any time anywhere. For example, you can check in on important metrics, gather knowledgeable insights from your results, and only pay when you see results – i.e. when someone clicks on your ad and visits your site.
Bottom Line
Finding the right apps to save you time is crucial, to be able to refocus your efforts on the most important tasks and projects you need to undertake. It’s a good idea to regularly browse the Apple App Store and Google Play for the latest app releases and updates to existing apps. You might be surprised at just how much time and energy you’ll save with the right combination of tools!
Shachar is Co-Founder at Ranky. He dreams about growth and startup marketing, wakes up to the Tweets of birds and he’s literally a Social person. He is also a football fan (but don’t ask him anything about FC Barcelona) and gadgets addicts. Stalk him on Twitter.
